NASA and the city of Rio de Janeiro have extended an agreement to support innovative and collaborative efforts to better understand, anticipate, monitor and respond to natural hazards and other impacts affecting the city. The collaboration leverages the unique attributes of NASA’s satellite data and modeling frameworks and Rio de Janeiro’s management and monitoring capabilities to improve awareness of how the city may be impacted by hazards and affected by climate change. The original five-year agreement was signed in December 2015 and was designed to share data, models and scientific and management expertise.
The renewed agreement continues the partnership for an additional five years, providing crucial continuity in monitoring hazards and environmental issues such as heavy rainfall, landslides, air quality, water quality and climate change impacts in and around the city.
Over the next five years, NASA and Rio de Janeiro team members plan to advance their shared goals in two major areas: first, in advancing science to improve situational awareness and response efforts for environmental disasters, and second, in propagating science throughout local schools and the general public.
In addition, the partnership will allow for new data applications such as the development of an urban flood model for the city. The model will be incorporated into NASA’s Land Information System, transferred to Rio de Janeiro’s data infrastructure, and then implemented within the city’s Municipal Urban Information System, known as SIURB. The joint effort tracks how city rain gauges compare with satellite precipitation data, which helps scientists and decision-makers better understand the types of extreme rainfall events that contribute to flood and landslide conditions.
Over the first five years of this partnership, the team made significant progress in developing and implementing hazard modeling within the city. Rio was the first local and operational implementation of NASA`s Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA) global landslide model, a project funded in part by NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Disasters program area. In the upcoming summer, LHASA Rio will be one of the triggers used to decide whether the city will change its operational level during rain events.
NASA scientists also took existing air quality forecast models – tailored to focus on Rio – and used machine learning techniques to combine data with the city’s air monitoring network. Now, in collaboration with local officials, the team is developing tools that will provide stakeholders and the local population easy access to air quality information.
The partnership’s success has been evident in various ways, including several case studies. One recent paper focused on the impact of COVID-19-related social distancing measures on air pollution over Rio. The work was a result of the rapid response capacity that NASA and city officials built through years of steady communication and collaboration.
Throughout the partnership, team members have found myriad ways to deepen that collaboration and share best practices. Capacity-building training sessions, scientific exchanges, and stakeholder workshops have all played an important role – both in helping the team grow and in connecting challenging research topics directly to societal needs. So far the team has come together for a 2016 workshop in New York, a 2019 workshop in Rio, visits to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, along with trips to the Rio Operations Center and Instituto Pereira Passos.
Over the past five years of this partnership, there have been substantial impacts on communities within Rio as well as learning and knowledge sharing at NASA. Models like LHASA Rio and the Air Quality Forecast are informing stakeholders on hazardous conditions in advance, allowing preemptive action to be taken. For example the air quality forecast is informing health care units of a possible increase in respiratory illnesses in case of an upcoming worsening of related air quality parameters, such as particulate matter.
A study on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect within Rio was developed based on Landsat 8 satellite’s Thermal Infrared Sensor, or TIRS, data and served as an important planning tool that allowed greening actions to be targeted to the areas of Rio most prone to extreme heat. These data are also in the backbone of a new tool designed to measure the impact of new urban projects in aspects like surface temperature, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.
NASA uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives, and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth’s interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.
For more information about NASA Earth science activities, visit https://www.nasa.gov/earth.
Tylar Greene
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Jacob Richmond
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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