UN-SPIDER conducted an expert mission to El Salvador from 12 to 15 July 2016. The mission included an official visit by Ms. Simonetta Di Pippo, Director of UNOOSA, to El Salvador. This official visit was arranged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a follow-up to the recent incorporation of El Salvador as a member of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
The opportunity was used by UN-SPIDER to meet with staff from the Civil Protection Directorate and of the Environmental Observatory to discuss the on-going process to establish an inter-institutional team in El Salvador that could be involved in the generation of geospatial information combining satellite imagery and in-situ data.
As in the case of Guatemala, UN-SPIDER staff took the opportunity to provide to the Civil Protection Directorate and the Environmental Observatory a series of updated maps on vegetation indexes including the EVI, the VCI and the SVI spanning from the summer of 2000 until the spring of 2016; and to discuss the advantages of visualizing a variety of social, economic, and environmental (vegetation) variables in addition to information on weather in case of droughts.
The mission included a meeting with the representatives of government agencies which have been invited by the Civil Protection Directorate to become members of an inter-institutional team to be tasked with the generation of geospatial information. Staff from the Civil Protection Directorate, the Environmental Observatory, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Education, the Geographic Institute and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs attended the meeting, which was conducted in the premises of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
