Hazards from volcanic eruptions pose risks to the lives and livelihood of local populations, with potential global impacts to businesses, agriculture, and air travel. The 2015 Global Assessment of Risk report notes that about 800 million people are estimated to live within 100 km of about 1400 subaerial volcanoes identified as having eruption potential. However, only 55% of these volcanoes have any type of ground­based monitoring.
The only methods currently available to monitor these unmonitored volcanoes are space­based systems that provide a global view. To address this challenge, the 2012 "Santorini report" from the "International Forum on Satellite EO and Geohazards" suggested an integrated, international, global remote sensing geohazards monitoring effort for disaster risk management (Bally et al., 2012) that could leverage the constellation of 20 or more satellites that can observe volcanoes to measure changes in morphology, deformation, degassing and temperature.
To realize the vision of the Santorini Report, the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) has initiated a 3-year Volcano Demonstrator project that will target volcanoes with high risk and the greatest need for remote sensing in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa — encompassing about half of the world’s potentially active subaerial volcanoes.
The CEOS demonstrator aims to improve disaster risk management (DRM) by linking the volcano observatories that are governmentally responsible for volcano monitoring with data providers at the international space agencies (ESA, CSA, ASI, DLR, JAXA, NASA, CNES) and remote sensing experts who analyse the data. A goal of the demonstrator is to understand the heterogeneous needs of volcano observatories around the world given their diverse capabilities as well as volcanoes with different manifestations of activity and environmental conditions.
We will present results from the first year of the Demonstrator as well as lessons learned from the CEOS Volcano Pilot Project (2014-2017) that had some similar goals, but just focused on Latin American volcanoes.

References
Ph. Bally Ed. (2012), Scientific and Technical Memorandum of The International Forum on Satellite EO and Geohazards, 21-23 May 2012, Santorini Greece. doi:10.5270/esa-geo-hzrd-2012

The Geohazards Lab is an initiative developed within the framework of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Disasters (WG Disasters) to enable a greater use of Earth Observation (EO) data and derived products to assess geohazards and their impact. The aim is to establish an inclusive and comprehensive process to optimise the use of EO technologies starting from the needs of national and local decision-makers in political and socio-economic sectors relevant to Disaster Risk Management (DRM).

The Geohazards Lab, an initiative based on a group of interoperable platforms with federated resources providing EO data access, hosted processing and e-collaboration capabilities to animate and support the geohazards user community. It is originated by the European Space Agency (ESA), with the support of several other CEOS space agencies, including the German Space Research Centre (DLR), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the French Space Agency (CNES). One of its precursors is the Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP), developed in the framework of the ESA Thematic Exploitation Platforms (TEP) initiative and is available since 2016.

In this context, the Geohazards Lab envisages building a collaborative framework with expert geoscience centres and users to achieve a greater adoption of EO methods. Its goals are to support the exploitation of online hosted processing capabilities with a focus on cloud processing solutions, define consensus methods in liaison with experts to harmonize EO based processing results, establish a methodological approach to support the generation of reference ground deformation measurements in support to historical hazard analysis, and finally, utilise available EO capabilities looking at geohazards. An example of such hosted processing tools already integrated to GEP is the MPIC-OPT service developed by Ecole et Observatoire des Sciences de la Terre (EOST), a joint research unit of French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and University of Strasbourg, for measuring horizontal displacements from time-series of optical satellite images. Other integrated services include several Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometric processors as well as dedicated services for deformation monitoring purposes exploiting ESA historical missions, Copernicus Sentinel missions and very high-resolution SAR data. The Geohazards Lab intends to support users with EO expertise from geoscience centres who are the priority intermediaries with end users from local and regional DRM organisations.

The Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), hosted by the European Commission Joint Research Center and developed under the Work Program of the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO), provides an internet based portal and repository of fire information with the goal of enabling a comprehensive view and evaluation of fire regimes and fire effects in support of policy making and national resource management. Currently the GWIS is a beta-version with limited content. The 18+ year MODIS fire product record is the longest systematically generated science quality global coverage fire record, and has been widely used in science and applications. To date however there is no service for the systematic generation of metrics and statistics that are accessible to non-technical users. Software to generate scientifically accepted, reproducible fire information, documented for non-technical users in easily accessible formats, will be developed that describe fire activity over different spatial regions and temporal periods, fire seasonality and fire size metrics. The information will be based on the global MODIS Collection 6 fire products. This presentation will highlight the GWIS improvements and showcase on-demand statistics, and tabular and graphical information, at state/regional, national, sub-continental, continental, and global spatial scales, for monthly, seasonal and annual time periods.

The international charter for space and major disasters has been founded in 1999 and declared operational as of November 2000, with 3 participating agency: ESA, CNES and CSA. In 18 years, it has been activated more than 570 times worldwide. The international charter is now composed of 17 agencies worldwide (to be added: NOAA, ISRO, CONAE, USGS, JAXA, UKSA, CNSA, DLR, KARI, INPE, EUMETSAT, ROSCOSMOS, ABAE, UAESA)

It is triggered for a large variety of disasters, either natural or related to man activity: earthquakes, fires, floods, Ice jams, landslides, tsunamis, ocean storms, volcanic eruptions, oil spills, industrial accidents. It is functioning on the best efforts basis. Each agency is committed to provide space data resources and value added processing as needed in the frame defined by the charter regulations.

With a fleet of more than 50 satellites orbiting at low altitude above our heads on various orbits, once activated, the charter provides the local authorities in charge of the disaster management on site, with detailed value added maps outlining the level of infrastructures destruction. Depending the type of disaster and its location on the Earth, the adequate sensors (medium and/or high resolution optical images or all-weather capability radar images) of the flying-by satellites are used.

The charter illustrates the fact that space technologies can deliver key information that brings benefit to the definition, planning, implementation, monitoring & assessment of disaster relief operations.

Being close to almost two decades of activity the charter is facing new challenges: the charter governance with the growing number of agency members, partnership expansion, universal access expansion, operational training, emerging private companies in the frame of the new space as data contributors, awareness & promotion activities, communication and training, hardware infrastructure evolution, systems interoperability, mechanisms of activation, capacity building development.

This paper will give an overview of the international charter activities and the future challenges to be considered in order to provide the users with enhanced disaster responses.

The work presented in this abstract is framed within the activity of the CEOS-DRM project (Committee on Earth Observation Satellite – Disater Risk Management). One of the targets of the project is to test the potential of change detection methodologies integrating very high resolution (VHR) images acquired by last-generation radar and optical sensors multisensory to monitor changes in the land use/land cover that can be related to the Sendai Framework for Action indicators.

The proposed approach integrates multisensor, multisource and contextual information associated with COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) and Pléiades images, thus formalizing the change-detection task in terms of a data fusion problem. Multitemporal fusion “at decision level” is used in this work. In particular, the change detection problem is operatively addressed through a multitemporal supervised classification approach for multisensor CSK/Pléiades data. The method makes use of Markov Random Field (MRF) theory to integrate the spatial context and the temporal correlation associated with the images acquired at the different dates and is fully integrated with a region-based approach able to characterize the geometrical structures in the images through the employment of multiple segmentation maps at different scales.
The approach has been applied to pairs of CSK/Pléiades centered in the city of Phnom Penh at different time steps. The target is to monitor the changes in land cover classes related to SFA indicators. The focus is on a subset of indicators C and D, that can be directly related to specific land cover classes. In particular C2-C, C-2FO, C-3, C-4, C-5, D2, D3, and D4.
The assessment of the values of the previous indicators is done in a “damage assessment” framework, that can be describes as follows:
1- Choice of a pre-defined hazard map of given magnitude (flood hazard is chosen in this case)
2- Identification of the exposed elements related to the selected SFA indicators, based on existing maps
3- Change detection and update of the exposed elements according to the results of the application of the described change detection algorithm
4- Evaluation of the damage (number of exposed elements impacted and economic value of the damage) for the flood scenario defined in 1

In order to exploit the potential of the change detection methodology and the spatial information of VHR imagery, the proposed approach is implemented in two following steps:
- a first analysis conducted on the acquired imagery subsampled at a resolution of 10 m;
- a second analysis performed on particularly interesting areas highlighted during the first step making use of the imagery at the maximum available resolution.

The Icelandic Volcanoes Supersite initiative has provided important results since its acceptance in 2013, both with new scientific results as well as societal benefits. Results have been communicated actively to the Iceland Civil Protection, including information on new unrest at Öræfajökull volcano, where re-tasking of COSMO-SkyMed satellites has allow formation of one-day interferogram to constrain ice flow in an area of elevated subglacial geothermal activity. Scientific results include a series of studies on the gradual collapse at Bárðarbunga volcano 2014-2015 and the associated eruption and rifting activity, both during and after the eruption. The most important satellite data that have been used by the science teams are from the COSMO-SkyMed and TerraSAR-X satellites (several hundred images from each), in addition to Sentinel-1 data. A challenge for the science teams has been the end of the European FutureVolc project in early 2016. That project provided direct funding to work with the supersite data, but after its end the science teams have used alternate sources to carry out research and monitoring. Considerable efforts have been devoted to study geothermal processes, both natural and also the effects of geothermal utilization. The icelandicvolcanoes.is website operated by the Icelandic Meteorological Office provides access to online catalogue of Icelandic volcanoes, an important resource with information on geology and eruptive history of Icelandic volcanoes, as well as alert levels of volcanoes and activity status based on seismic activity. A website dedicated to the Icelandic Volcanoes supersite is also hosted at University of Iceland: icelandsupersite.hi.is. A continuation of the Icelandic Volcanoes Supersite initiative, with commitment from space agencies and a continuing active research group working with the supersite data, including those contributing in situ data, has the potential to provide important social benefits and new findings in the future.