Space-based Technology for Emergency Management: The COSMO-SkyMed Constellation Contribution

Abstract In the past decade the space sector has been developing solutions to support the timely response to natural and man-made disasters. The Italian COSMO-SkyMed constellation is providing a significant contribution to this goal providing timely and accurate radar images used in a wide variety of applications - from flood mapping to earthquake damage assessment - during a considerably high number of real emergency events. This article provides details about application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data supporting emergency response operations as well as the description of recent real use cases.