Disasters: the UN report

Been very busy recently. It looks like our group is going to have an independent team looking at UAVs (which is cool). Anyway I've spent some time recently going back-to-basics and having a glance at disaster relief papers to see what sort of requirements might be needed (see my last post).

As a quick addition, here's a nice quote form a UN paper on the issue:

High-resolution imagery—defined here as being able
to see to the level of one meter—has not traditionally
been available at the field level for operating agencies
immediately after a disaster. Imagery can be critical to
making operational decisions, especially in regards
to logistics. But imagery also is time consuming to
process and analyze—a task for which field staff has
precious little time. During the response to the 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami, the UN staff in Aceh had asked
for detailed imagery of bridge outages so that they
could design supply chains around the island. They
had also requested nighttime infrared imagery of the island, hoping that heat of campfires and congregations
of (warm) people would help the UN identify where the
populations of destroyed villages had moved. While
they eventually received some imagery, they never
received a data set that answered their operational
questions.

In the Haiti instance, these images were provided from satellites and overflights, but the requirement for imagery is clearly a vital one, lending credence to the use of UAVs in this way.