The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) hosted the SERVIR Hub Exchange Programme from 10–13 March 2015. During the week long programme, participants discussed and shared experiences in cloud-based automated flood mapping.

The programme brought together experts from the three SERVIR hubs – SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa, hosted by the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD); SERVIR-Mekong, hosted by the Asia Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADAPC), and SERVIR-Himalaya, hosted by ICIMOD – as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the SERVIR Coordination Office, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) office in Nepal.

In addition to learning about a new technologies, the participants had an opportunity to exchange their knowledge and experiences in flood mapping.

Africa Flores, NASA-SERVIR point of contact for the Eastern and Southern Africa region, said, “This exchange gave people working in different SERVIR hubs an opportunity to learn about state of the art technology that will ultimately enable the hubs to process satellite data in seconds and publish derived products to end users in near-real time.”

Tom Zearley, from the office of USAID-Nepal, said, “The work started here to create a more user friendly interface will make SERVIR tools more understandable and actionable for both local community users and high-level decision makers, and will take SERVIR to the next level of user engagement”.

“The SERVIR Hub Exchange in flood mapping was incredibly successful. The cloud instances developed with support from NASA-SERVIR will help us improve the products we develop through the CREST-GFT mapping interface, while also making it easy for users to search for products from our other flood mapping tasks using the application”, said Denis Macharia Muthike, lead for SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa’s disasters programme.

SERVIR-Mekong’s Kittiphong Phongsapan said, “As a new hub, SERVIR-Mekong will take away a great deal of learning from this exchange, both about other hub’s activities, and SERVIR in general”.

Deo Raj Gurung, remote sensing specialist at ICIMOD said, “Apart from learning about new technology, the interaction with other SERVIR hubs was very useful. Different hubs have been working on similar areas of work, but have been doing it in isolation. This hub exchange programme has opened avenues to explore and tap into each other’s resources and skills”.

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