Development of Flood Space Monitoring in Kazakhstan

Abstract

From the moment of appearance of the first systems of remote sensing of the Earth, allowing to carry out survey in a real time mode, one of the main directions of their use is the operative control of various emergency situations, first of all fires and high waters. At the same time the general principles and methods of space monitoring of high waters and flooding have been formulated (Barton & Bathols, 1989). Now this direction still intensively develops in the various countries. In Kazakhstan such large flooding which are characteristic for the Siberian rivers and modern Europe were observed seldom. Therefore real conditions for development of system of space monitoring of flooding have appeared after installation at Space Research Institute (now it was a part of National Center of Space Research and Technologies) in 2001 reception station of the Russian firm SCANEX providing reception of Terra MODIS data (the resolution 250 m) in a real time mode. Since then this system actively developed in Kazakhstan (Spivak et al., 2004, 2005; Arkhipkin et al., 2007; Arkhipkin & Sagatdinova , 2008). It should provide the operative observation of republic territory, detection and mapping the real and potential centers of flooding of natural and technogenic character. The brief description of technology of work of flood space monitoring system and the most important results is presented below.