NCCS GIS Capabilities Support NASA Disaster Mapping and Citizen Science


The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Spatial Analytics Platform and related Geographic Information System (GIS) capabilities are supporting NASA disaster mapping and a new landslide citizen science activity.

The NASA Disasters Program puts NASA scientific research relevant to disasters into the hands of end users in the emergency management community, who can use it to help make better decisions and save lives and property. The NCCS-hosted NASA Disasters Mapping Portal facilitates timely access to reliable, relevant data and data products. It has aided emergency responses as varied as Midwestern U.S. flooding, California mudslides and wildfires, and a volcanic eruption on Vanuatu in the South Pacific.
 
Interactive maps of U.S. Midwestern floods are one of many applications on the NCCS-hosted NASA Disasters Mapping Portal.

“NCCS support was instrumental in the setup, installation, and infrastructure management plan the Disasters Mapping Portal required prior to official launch in February 2018,” said Gabriel Borroni, former GIS lead for the NASA Disasters Program. “Without the attention and support NCCS provided the Portal would not be in the position to provide valuable resources and data to the International Disasters Community.”

The Landslides @ NASA activity is building a global landslide catalog available to the public, researchers, and the disaster response community for improved understanding of where and when events occur. The NCCS-hosted Landslide Viewer allows anyone to visualize and download landslide data, while the Landslide Reporter empowers citizen scientists to add landslide events to the catalog.
 
Landslide events reported by citizen scientists await approval in the NCCS-hosted Landslide Reporter.

“NCCS efforts to build the citizen science application using the ESRI platform have been fundamental to opening up landslide data to the community as well as providing a platform for people around the world to contribute landslide information,” said Dalia Kirschbaum, research physical scientist in NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Hydrological Sciences Laboratory. “This concept is something that hasn’t been done yet at the global scale for landslides and represents a unique opportunity to lead the way in advancing landslide science.”