[HOT] Paraguay floods

[Harry Wood]

Yesterday I pinged a quick email to some folks from MapAction because they have decided to send some people to Paraguay in response to flooding there, but actually this is ongoing since April, so not a screaming urgent new disaster. And I think on the whole, because the area affected is large, it's not well suited to a big OpenStreetMapping response. For a more focussed mapping challenge see previous emails about mapping the Niger river in Mali. Plus the job in Gao of course:http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/43



But if you're interested in Paraguay...

The specific thing they're working on is digitising areas mapped as marshes from some russian raster maps. I'm not familiar with Mapstor, but I notice the croatian OSMers have worked with it. I'm guessing it's quite low scale mapping. Probably more trouble than it's worth to try to bring this into editors, but maybe someone feels differently. Anyway the MapAction guys are making good progress with digitising it (they showed me a map of marshes half-finished) 

Floods are mostly hitting the two regions highlighted here: http://reliefweb.int/disaster/fl-2012-000056-pry  They sent me another map, but it's just highlighting those same two big regions. That's here on the map: http://osm.org/go/M3di5  The bing imagery coverage analyser http://bit.ly/Oc1B0o  isn't well filled-in, but look there's a bit more hi-res imagery appeared making the boundary way out-of-date, but still funny strips missing. As we see throughout the world, there's a fair amount road mapping to be done in rural Paraguay (the little airports tend to have major looking dirt tracks leading to them for example), and loads of river mapping which works well even using Landsat.


Harry


----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Matt Sims
Sent: Monday, 2 July 2012, 17:16
Subject: RE: OSM meet-up + paraguay floods

Hi Harry and thanks Andy,

Having problems with emails, so you might get this again.

As Andy has mentioned we have a team on their way to Paraguay, arriving shortly. The team leader, Philip Moore, has asked if we could get create some vectors from the Russian topo maps of the marsh areas, as he has found them useful in the past to predicted potential areas of flood, assuming they are not under water already. If your or anyone else would like to look at this, this would be great.

Affected area: Attached is a map of Paraguay with the known flood extents. The floods have been ongoing since April. The main affected Departmentos are Borqueron and Presidente Hayes, but the El Chaco region also includes Alto Paraguay. Flooding has also been reported around Concepcion. The insert map shows population density.

The second map shows the marshes (dark blue) that Karl and Ming have managed to digitalise so far within the affected area. I?m told the Mapstor sheets left area - sheets are xf21_3 and xg21_1.

Settlement data would also be useful. We have some quite good sets already but anything that OSM can find (or anything else) would be a useful addition.

Many thanks,

Matt

From: Andy Kervell 
Sent: 02 July 2012 14:18
To: Harry Wood; Ian Holt (Google)
Subject: RE: OSM meet-up + paraguay floods

Hi Harry

Great to hear from you, and good to catch up at the GeoDrinks the other month.  I have forwarded on your offer of assistance to Matt Sims in MapAction who is coordinating Support Base today for Paraguay.  We do have a possible requirement to capture areas of marsh as vectors, which your team may be able to help with and update OSM at the same time?

I will let Matt coordinate/request this though (cc'ed) so I don't ask for conflicting data.  A good source for this data could be from U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency maps available on this website:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/paraguay.html

The three scales of topo mapping 1:1mill, 1:250k and 1:100k on this site all have marsh areas indicated and could be of use to the deployable team as vectors.

Anyway hopefully Matt will be in touch.

Speak soon

Andy Kervell