Brazilian Government's Wide-Area-Surveillance System

Monitoring the Amazon Environment

Preserving the environment for future generations while promoting economic development today is one of the greatest challenges facing governments around the world. The Amazon region is an enormous territory that contains one-third of the earth's tropical forests in an area of more than two million square miles (5.2 million square kilometers). The region contains more than 30 percent of the earth's known plant and animal species, with more being discovered every year. Dropping less than two inches per mile after emerging from the Andes Mountains, the Amazon drains a sixth of the earth's runoff into the ocean. It is also an area suffering from a wide range of problems including illegal gold mining, deforestation, and other conflicts related to land use and occupation.

Raytheon Company, an Esri Business Partner, is helping the Brazilian government meet this challenge by developing a wide-area-surveillance system to cover the Amazon region, with GIS playing a key role. The system that Raytheon is building in Brazil—called the System for Vigilance of the Amazon, or SIVAM—will use a wide range of sensors, including stationary radars, geophysical monitors, and airborne sensors and satellites, to gather extensive data from the Amazon. This information will be processed and integrated using GIS tools and distributed to numerous Brazilian government and independent agencies. These agencies will then use the information to protect the sensitive environment of the Amazon; improve air safety; increase the accuracy of weather forecasting; assist in the detection, prevention, and control of epidemics; help to manage land occupation and usage; and ensure effective law enforcement and border control.

The remote sensing data for the SIVAM system is processed at four locations within Brazil: three regional surveillance centers within the Amazon and a general coordination center in Brasilia, the nation's capital. These centers will provide users from government, industry, and academia access to environmental data and analysis tools.

The system development and integration of these processing centers are being carried out by Raytheon's Imagery and Geospatial Systems Business unit in Garland, Texas, as part of the overall SIVAM system being developed by Raytheon's Command, Control, Communication, and Information (C3I) Systems Business unit. The system development is currently in the implementation phase. ArcView GIS and ArcInfo, as well as ERDAS IMAGINE, are key software components in these processing centers. All derived thematic data is stored in an Oracle database accessed via ArcSDE.

According to Roger Yarbro, program director for the SIVAM-SCC (SCC is a Brazilian Portuguese acronym which stands for Subcentro de Coordena��o [Coordination Subcenter]) in Garland, "We are using GIS technology to integrate the wide variety of spatial data being collected by SIVAM and effectively share the information with users."

The environmental surveillance applications within each processing center provide for ingest and interactive analysis of various imagery products including Landsat, SPOT, RADARSAT, ERS, and the Chinese-Brazilian CBERS. The remote sensing data is processed to produce thematic layers in the SIVAM GIS database, which also contains a broad selection of relevant data from other Brazilian agencies. A collection of custom and off-the-shelf tools is provided to process, analyze, and model the data for various uses and to produce a large number of maps and reports tailored to a variety of consumer needs. Environmental reports and maps are provided in five different application groups including ecosystems; deforestation; hydrology; land use and occupation; and pollution, environmental, and health risks.

An example of the custom ArcView GIS tools is the Map Generator extension. More than 30 types of standard map products must be produced in the Environmental Surveillance subsector. Since many cartographic production tasks are similar, Raytheon is providing a GIS tool to simplify SIVAM map production. Custom ArcView GIS/ArcInfo extensions are provided with interactive menus that allow user selection of a specific map sheet for production.

The SIVAM-SCC program is in the last year of development. "In particular, the final acceptance test will be in Garland, Texas, and is scheduled for July 2001," says Raytheon's Byron Thompson, SIVAM team leader, "and the first site acceptance test is currently scheduled for September 2001 in Manaus, Brazil."

For more information, contact Byron Thompson (tel.: 972-205-4849, fax: 972-205-4630, e-mail: Byron_J_Thompson@raytheon.com).

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