Abstract:
In June 1998 the German Government through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Humanitarian Affairs, established the South East Asian Fire Monitoring Unit under the national IDNDR programme at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. The unit monitors all natural parameters and the disaster management measures taken at national and international levels to provide a realistic, real-time assessment for national and international responses to future fire and smoke disasters in South East Asia. The monitoring unit at the Fire Ecology and Biomass Burning Research Group is located at the Airport Campus of the University Freiburg, Germany. The unit has established all data transfer links to the most important institutions world-wide which provide real-time or near-real time analysis of remotely sensed data of the region (active fires, smoke, weather, atmospheric composition), current weather and weather forecasts, and fire weather indices. Furthermore, the unit monitors all previous, current and planned national and foreign-supported activities in Indonesia and the ASEAN region, including the international activities, which aim to contribute to short-term disaster response and medium- to long-term disaster prevention planning. The monitoring unit aims to provide information to national German and international (United Nations) response to the situation in the region. The long-term aim of the monitoring unit is to provide a comprehensive real-time and archived global fire and smoke situation analysis which will support decision making at international level. The poster describes the state of the project three months after establishment.