Pathfinder - Geospatial Intelligence Supports Community and National Resilience

submitted by Karen Walker

In the past two years, NGA has responded to a series of natural disasters at home and abroad. Whether providing support to emergency response teams working the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Japan or tornadoes and floods in the United States, NGA employees worldwide have demonstrated the critical role of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in answering the call for help.

Our humanitarian assistance/disaster response work, among all the roles and responsibilities that come with managing the nation’s GEOINT capabilities, brings us closest to the people and communities in need during times of crisis. Our GEOINT tools and analyses save lives by helping our mission partners determine where help is needed most, by enabling the right people to be at the right place at the right time, and by anticipating what might happen next.

In partnership with our key stakeholders at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State, our goal is to help domestic and international communities become stronger, more resilient and better prepared for the future. NGA’s Disaster Support Initiative, supported by NGA’s GEOINT Visualization Services, gets us to this goal. Recognizing that our partners are becoming more proficient users of GEOINT, the architecture driving our applications allows individuals closest to the scene to integrate information from multiple sources in real time.

The stories shared in this issue highlight some of the Disaster Support Initiative’s key accomplishments. They
show how our new content and applications, in concert with mobile commercial-off-the-shelf technology, empower first responders by making GEOINT discoverable and usable in an unclassified operating environment.

These accomplishments provide a foundation for the Disaster Support Initiative to address a more robust set of
challenges. With a better understanding of our mission partners’ operating environments and their relationships
with state and local communities, foreign governments and multilateral organizations, we can now form a
holistic view of domestic and international networks and systems for emergency preparedness and response. In
the near future, NGA will stand up an Integrated Work Group (IWG) for disaster support, to focus the expertise
of a number of disciplines to develop new tools, analytic methods and work processes to address preparedness
and response challenges, taking both man-made and natural disasters into account. Through the IWG, NGA
will broaden and deepen analysis for early warning and fine-tune its engagement with partners responding to
long-term and complex humanitarian crises.

The strength of our GEOINT vision is clearly visible in our work with first responders and disaster relief
professionals at home and abroad. I am proud of how much we’ve already accomplished in this critical arena. By
putting the power of GEOINT into the hands of local, national and international civil authorities and emergency
response teams, we are helping them save lives as well as rebuild stronger and more resilient communities. This
is a strong affirmation of the importance of our work and the necessity of our vision.

Letitia A. Long

Director

https://www1.nga.mil/MediaRoom/Publications/Pages/default.aspx

Pathfinder - NGA Magazine - Humanitarian Assistance and Homeland Security - January/February 2012 (24 page .PDF file)

https://www1.nga.mil/MediaRoom/Publications/Documents/Pathfinder_JanFeb_2012.pdf