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Anna Rose: Welcome to Life Solved from the ���ϳԹ�. In this podcast, we explore the latest research breakthroughs that look set to have an impact on all of our lives. From economics and sustainability to health, society and the environment. ���ϳԹ�is championing innovation and cutting edge ideas to apply real change.

Anna Rose: In this series, we're looking at breakthroughs in the way we observe, predict and preserve life on Earth. Earlier in this series, we heard from Dr Carmen Solana on her work to help island communities become safer in the face of extreme natural events. And today, John Worsey talks to Richard Teeuw, professor of geoinformatics and disaster risk reduction, here at the ���ϳԹ� to find out how we can predict geohazards.

Richard Teeuw: They can be anything from flood plains to the volcanoes through to areas of faults and fractures that'll be affected by earthquakes.

Anna Rose: And he explains how we can combine satellite imagery with drones and community action to crowdsource emergency response efforts in the future.

Richard Teeuw: That 24 to 48 hours is a time when a lot of useful data could be collected by local people, local enthusiasts with a bit more training on how to use drones and how to process satellite images.

Anna Rose: Nature is always in motion, but disasters happen when people are present in major natural events referred to as vulnerable features.

Richard Teeuw: There was a huge earthquake in the Mojave Desert back in the 1990s. The biggest that California had ever had. But it was in the middle of the desert and nobody lived there. So it wasn't a disaster. It was just a major earthquake.

Anna Rose: Richard was frustrated that courses catered for predicting disasters and crises, but there was little education in how to avert them.

Richard Teeuw: There were plenty of courses that showed you how to assess hazards and map them, but very few of them then went the next stage in terms of communicating that to the people that would be affected by them and therefore the people who do something to reduce the risk of disaster.

Anna Rose: That's the reason Richard set up one to address that here at Portsmouth. But not content with addressing disaster responses in education, Richard is also passionate about utilising freely available data for the benefit of lower-income countries, particularly those at risk from extreme weather events or geological hazards. And he says there's a way of getting around the cost barriers that hinder sustainable development with the emergence of high-quality, open-source software for interpreting freely available data. Combining ever more widely available technology with highly detailed space satellite data means more people around the world have access to sophisticated information. The first step in disaster prevention.

Richard Teeuw: If you look at the likes of Open Street Map. That started off, I think in Oxford, and I think it was students, Woah, way back over 10 years ago who were a bit fed up with paying a lot of money to access ordnance survey map data online. So they realised there was some aerial photography that was available for free, that they could then make their own maps from drawing on top of that. So they produced a standardised system called Open Street Map. That got bigger and bigger and was then used around Europe, not just Oxford. And just before the Haiti earthquake, they kind of perfected the way they did the mapping. And with the Haiti earthquake, which I think was in 2010, they were able to use Open Street Map in conjunction with a few, especially satellite companies, which provided very detailed satellite imagery. And they remapped all the streets of Port au Prince, the capital of Haiti, probably in more detail than it had ever been done before the actual earthquake. They marked on where the refugee camps were, where the parks were, and that was done by volunteers around the world. They could access the system online. They could see an area that had not yet been mapped. They were shown how to map in a standardised way. And then there were assessors from Open Street Map who checked the quality, and that would then get published so that anybody in the world could then see the maps that had been created by those volunteers. So that, in effect, is crowdsourced mapping. Even your mobile phone has got a GPS in it. That's what's telling you where you're going when you use TomTom. With a mobile phone, you can take a photograph, you can tag it to your GPS location anywhere in the world, and you can record the time. And that's one way in which people with a mobile phone then are becoming crowd sensors and can collect information, which we can then store centrally and link back to the satellite image of that area and check what was happening at that time. So there's a kind of interaction now between the big data that we're getting from space and the big data that we can get from social media.

Anna Rose: And in addition to truly sophisticated and detailed satellite coverage with up to 10-metre detail that refreshes regularly, entrepreneurism is driving a new wave of innovation. This creates amazing opportunities for organisations responding to natural disasters.

Richard Teeuw: With a new generation of satellites, the micro satellites that you might have heard about, CubeSat. These are the size of a shoebox. And this is where Small Start-Up companies have got involved rather than big space agencies. These start-ups, such as planet dot com in California, they use off the shelf cameras, digital cameras, put them into these very small satellites, launch 100 at a time, packed in amongst the spare space when they launch a big satellite, a telecom satellite or whatever. Basically, they're getting into space for free. And from February last year, they had enough of them up there, hundreds of them, to give you daily coverage of any part of the earth's surface. So we've gone from two-week coverage to daily coverage within the space of just a few years, really. So there's been a huge surge in the amount of data that's available, the detail with which we can see the earth and the frequency with which we can see what's happening and look at changes, which is very important if you're in a crisis or a disaster situation and you've got a lot of damage and people are displaced and areas are flooded and roads are damaged and things like that.

Anna Rose: Richard told us how collaboration was key when Cyclone Harold became the largest ever to hit the South Pacific in 2020. The data his ���ϳԹ�team were able to quickly gather, helped authorities on the islands impacted coordinate their emergency responses.

Richard Teeuw: It started in the Solomon Islands and then headed southwards. It hit the northern islands of Vanuatu. And then it just grounds the southern islands of Fiji before it faded out and became a tropical storm. It was a Category five, which is the highest on the scale. And that tracked down through a number of countries that we're working with at the moment through a project called Common Sensing, which is funded by UK Space Agency and led by the UN through their U.N. Institute of Training and Research, UNITAR. UNITAR are involved with mapping disasters. They have a group called UNOSAT that uses satellite imagery for rapid response to disasters to map the areas of damage and the extent of damage. So we were able to link up with them and their team and provide information and data to them because they would then provide that to the governments, particularly the government of Vanuatu because that was worst hit by this cyclone. We were able to, first of all, go in and use radar imagery, which we downloaded from the European Space Agency, and we could use that to then highlight the areas in the north of Vanuatu where there was severe flooding. The problem with using conventional satellites is that if you're using a satellite that looks at visible and Infra-Red, all you will see is the top of the storm cloud, you won't see through them. And in a cyclone or hurricane event, you have to really use radar to see through the cloud cover. It will go through the clouds. It will interact with water, and water stands out very clearly. So we could then produce a map showing where the flooding was around the main urban areas that were affected by the storm and the rainfall. And that was one application using the radar. We also were able to see as it happened from the day when they captured the image where the eye of the cyclone was and what its path was as it headed towards those northern islands. That was it for about the next six days. There wouldn't be another radar image for at least another six days. But we were then able to switch to the daily satellite imagery provided by planets. As the storm blew over, then it became more cloud-free, and then we could use the planet scope to look down and pick out the roads. Now, the data we get from Sentinal, the radar imagery and the other imagery we get from these about 10-metre pixels, Planet Scope gives you pixels that it's three and a half metres. So you're seeing things in a lot more detail. You could pick out individual buildings, and you can pick out vehicles on roads and stuff like that. And that is not-- is not great for mapping detail damage to buildings, but is just right for district-scale mapping because we can then follow the roads and all these islands, get to the point where there should be a bridge. See the bridge had been destroyed, note the location of that bridge. We could follow the road and see where the road is then buried under a landslide. There was a big scar in the rainforest where you only saw Earth now, and the landslide had slid down and then closed the road. We could mark that point as well. And we were able to then catalogue hundreds of these features across the islands in a matter of hours and then send that information over to the UN, who