NASA-DEVELOP/ADIM

The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) was established in 1986 to provide technical services and capabilities to national governments in the region. Together with NASA and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), ADPC is able to use satellite imagery and other geospatial decision-support tools to aid in the prediction and management of environmental events, as well as help communities build resilience to the negative effects of natural hazards in this area of the world. In August 2015, NASA, USAID, and ADPC officially launched the SERVIR-Mekong Hub at the ADPC in Bangkok, Thailand. This hub is in place to support and provide publicly available satellite data on the Lower Mekong region in order to address pressing environmental concerns in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is a five-year regional project aimed at increasing the use of geospatial analysis in addressing common or urgent policy and planning needs. The project partners at the ADPC, SERVIR-Mekong Hub, and the NASA SERVIR Coordination Office expressed the need for a script that automates the downloading and processing of data in order to better monitor agricultural drought in the Lower Mekong River Basin.