Environmental monitoring and disaster managing activities are large generators of data having extremely different nature, both in terms of their physical nature and meaning. The purpose of the course is to give a panoramic view of the characteristics of the data and of the sensors, of the used transmission channels, of the data storage and the integration/comparison with physical models for emergency management and forecasting. Hints concerning their uses and the international efforts to standardize the entire process to make effective the data use specially in emergency situations will be given.

Capacity to evaluate the complexity of environmental and disaster management problems, and the ability to choose the best technical tools to be adopted.

The basic knoweledge acquired during the First Degree and the common cultural background acquired by the student in the CdLM involved.

Environmental monitoring and disaster managing activities imply the use of data and models to be integrated in emergency management and forecasting systems (meteorological forecast, flood and landslides forecasts, but also yields forecast for economic market-oriented applications or for humanitarian emergencies). Such data have extremely different nature (slow changing in time like geographic information, vegetation distribution, road traffic , population movements, air and water quality, climatic and meteorological parameters, or extremely fast changing like landslide motion, earthquake effects, tsunami or of such different nature as the evaluation of people present in refugee camps and the flow of a flood wave). They are originated by fixed sensors or moving platforms, and may be image-like or simply referred to a point. All this data need to be transmitted, exploiting different transmission channels which may have extremely different properties, ending up in different data bases with an extremely variety of formats. Finally, many efforts are presently conducted in order to standardize the data and data flow from their collection to their storage, for assuring their effective real-time use.
Five topics will be examined and completed with exercises and case study descriptions:
- Data acquisition and local data storage and processing
- Data transmission channels
- Data interchange
- Examples of models
- National, European and United Nations project for the standardization.