|
NOAA's Participation in WSSD |
Geographic Information for Sustainable Development (GISD) Partnership
NOAA is a key player in the U.S. government's Global Information on Sustainable Development (GISD) Initiative, part of an international effort to use a new generation of Earth observation data, geographic information technologies and other elements of what specialists call "spatial data infrastructure" (SDI) to help decision makers address sustainable development problems. All GISD-sponsored projects involve testing new approaches to field-level management of such problems as food security, sustainable agriculture, natural resource management, disaster mitigation and poverty alleviation. Specifically, the GISD initiative provides processing of satellite data and construction of GIS maps that will help analyze rates of change over time in coastal resource and land use patterns. These analyses will help identify priority locations for coastal action planning and conservation, aquaculture and tourism development
planning and land use zoning.
GISD's ongoing pilot projects in Africa have already justified the value of using GISD for a broad range of sustainable development challenges of the next decade. Many of these projects utilize data from NOAA's Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer and archive data from the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. Lessons learned will be shared online and through publications, exhibits and side events at the WSSD and other venues.
In addition to supporting the GISD activities, NOAA has made and will continue to make its satellite data fully and freely available to users worldwide.
Publication of the
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Last Updated: 8/21/02
