Project Objectives (page 1 of 3)

• To convene the nine member working Executive Committee, chaired by the PPD, and composed of the NPD, the three Co-PIs, Cairo University’s Chair of Aerospace Engineering and the Director of Center for Environmental Hazard Mitigation (CEHM), Al Azhar University’s Director of the Science Center for Detection & Remediation of Environmental Hazards (SCDREH) and the Ground Receiving Manager for the National Authority for Remote Sensing & Space Sciences (NARSS) to develop protocols, data sharing agreements, joint research, and operational & logistical details, with respect to best management practices for disaster mitigation.
  
  
• To formally establish the nine member KEEO Advisory Board, to be composed of the Director of the Crisis and Disaster Management Sector in the Prime Minister’s Information & Decision Support Center (IDSC), the Chairman of NARSS, the President of the Agricultural Research Center (ARC), the Regional Project Coordinator for Flood Preparedness & Early Warning for the Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO), the Regional Adviser for Emergency Preparedness & Humanitarian Action for the World Health Organization’s (WHO), a Professor at Assiut University (Assiut , Egypt), a Research Scientist in Environment Canada’s Science and Technology Branch, the Vice President for Research/Professor – Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Remote Sensing Scientist – UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) (N’Djamena, Chad), to review project plans, monitor & evaluate progress.
  
  
• To develop ground station bid specifications, solicit bids, select the vendor, determine optimal installation sites, choose connectivity routes between the KEEO and key end-users, install the ground receiving stations and associated hardware and software and implement the plan for systems management, automated data analysis and data product distribution.
  
  
• To initiate tiered training, to include (a) vendor provided system-specific training to the Co-Directors, junior faculty colleagues, technical staff and student research assistants, (b) specific data product determination and utilization training for end-user personnel, as well as (c) multi-disciplinary curricular revision and courseware development to best prepare young scholars to make optimal use of real-time and archival remotely sensed data for site specific research and trend analysis in support of environmental sustainability, public health and safety.
  
  
• To implement an operational ground-station primarily focusing on biogenic and anthropogenic disaster early warning & mitigation (e.g. storms, flooding, drought, desertification, urban sprawl, crop failure, water resource depletion and/or contamination, fires, infectious disease vector habitat detection and disease prevalence mapping, to mitigate epidemics among the human population as well as epizootics among the feral and domesticated animal population) that demonstrably serves to inform partners within the public sector ministries and regional offices of multi-lateral agencies, broadly engages the academic community in this initiative, builds technological capacity and develops indigenous expertise.

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