Critical Assets
Critical Assets
Critical Assets monitoring within the context of G-MOSAIC directly refers to the security frame of GMES. Critical Assets comprise a wide variety of elements, either manmade structures or natural, whose disruption, destruction or alteration may cause problems for the security of the States and citizens. EPCIP (European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection) is the EU programme for the protection of such infrastructures ([COM (2006) 786, 787]).
Examples of manmade elements include energy pipelines, storage tanks, power stations, reservoirs, water treatment plants, transport exchange knots and networks, industrial sites, landmark buildings. Natural critical assets are monitored on the premise that they may lead to natural and humanitarian chaos, loss of property or economic disruption. They include severe terrain conditions such as slope gradients, hydrological criticalities including wetlands, land use / land cover (LULC) criticalities such as deforestation, severe weather episodes like tropical storms and geo-instability.
Services
Two pilot services are developed in the domain of Critical Assets:
Example: Pipeline explosion in Moscow
The image below shows the detection of a pipeline explosion (09.05.2009) in Moscow with the SEVIRI thermal channel and the follow-up analysis of the site performed with ALOS-PALSAR. No cloud free optical images registered the site within the critical time frame of 2 months after the event.
