Earth monitor meeting makes progress
Clare Nullis, Associated Press, Yahoo News 30 Nov 07;
The Group on Earth Observations aims to link up the myriad satellites, ground stations, radar systems and ocean monitors that often operate in isolation.
Working together, the monitoring systems could boost the capacity to predict — and protect against — droughts, floods, hurricanes and disease.
"The goal is to provide the right information in the right format at the right time to the right people so they can make the right decisions," U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said Friday during the group's annual conference in Cape Town.
China and Brazil promised to distribute their Earth observation satellite data free to Africa, while the European Union has also launched a project to help Africa close its Earth observation gaps.
Enormous strides in the sharing of technology and pooling of ideas have been made in the past few years. There are tsunami alert systems to prevent a repeat of the 2004 southeast Asian catastrophe that killed 230,000 people.
But the challenges associated with global warming, overpopulation, deforestation and desertification are growing. There are glaring gaps in poor, heavily populated countries, and too little overall coordination.
The warnings for a recent Bangladesh cyclone came from a Bangladesh-born hurricane expert in the United States who made his own calculations about the impact of the storm and send word home.
The 3,500 killed were a fraction of the toll of earlier years.
A Global Earth Observation System was devised in 2005 for completion in 2015 with the aim of allowing access to a vast quantity of information on changes in the Earth's land, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere through a single Web portal.
The system envisages common technical standards to ensure that data emanating from one country can be received and understood in another. One of the items up for discussion Friday was a common alert protocol that would include a single radio frequency for disasters — such as operates for air traffic control.
If authorities were able to predict drought three to six months in advance, this would enable them made decisions on planting crops and water resource allocation way ahead of time.
In the United States, this could help save billions of dollars, and in Africa it would save untold lives, Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press.
Tracking and combating the spread of infectious diseases like malaria and cholera could be improved if early warning systems were developed for infected areas, according to South African Science and Technology Minister Mosibudi Mangena.
Similarly, early warnings of likely epidemics in Africa's "meningitis belt," would allow health experts to integrate user-friendly climate forecasts into vaccination and treatment programs for the disease.
Kempthorne said information and expertise gleaned from the North American Drought Monitor program developed by Canada, Mexico and the United States would be made available to other continents.
"Each of the nations represented here holds pieces to a puzzle which, when the different pieces are assembled, we get a total view of Earth," Kempthorne said.
"More people will be fed, more diseases mitigated and more lives saved from natural disasters," as a result.
He said the sense of cooperation at the conference was overwhelming, far removed from the bitter politics surrounding global warming.
The United States has been seen as slow to even acknowledge man was causing global warning, and has balked at the 1997 Kyoto accord requiring 36 industrial nations to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.
