Information Collation and Satellite Images in the new Swedish Crisis Management System

In this report a preliminary assessment of how satellite imagery can be used as a source of information in the new Swedish crisis management system is presented. An assessment of how such information can contribute to the overall situational awareness within the crisis management system is described. In the report the present imagery capacity in Sweden as well as in Europe is also introduced. Finally there is an assessment of the impact that present and planned future systems have on the ability of the new Swedish crisis management organisation. In the every day work of the crisis management system, imagery can be used to establish patterns of normality and deviation making it useful as one out of several tools for early warning. In an ongoing crisis imagery can be used to quickly establish a situational picture and assessment of the extent of, for example, a natural disaster such as a tsunami. The use of imagery in an ongoing crisis requires quick reaction times. Images need to be received, analysed and information disseminated in a matter of hours rather than days. This puts high demands on the capacity of an imagery system. To achieve robust and reliable crisis information Sweden would need to have access to a surveillance satellite that can be controlled from Sweden. The alternative is for the crisis management system to rely on the goodwill of image providers as was the case during the 2004 Tsunami. Today Sweden cooperates with France and Belgium on the SPOT-system. It produces images in the 5 meter resolution range. Sweden has chosen not to use these images as a national asset but has given exclusive rights to the company Metria to exploit the images commercially. There has been a significant development of applications in which SPOT images are used both in private businesses and in academia. Sweden continues its cooperation with France et al in the Pléiades programme and the first satellite is to be launched in 2009. Pléiades will produce images of a resolution better than one meter. Even though the images are suitable for crisis management, there will be few applications of these images outside the military and intelligence community at the time of launch. The crisis management system will be needing assistance with both development of methods for exploiting high resolution images and interpretation of the images. Crucial for all information collection and collation organisations is who should be responsible of and how should they collate, assess and disseminate the information. Assessment of satellite imagery requires specialists to process and extract information from the images. For a new Swedish crisis management system this presents a key challenge since such function would need to be created or an existing one coupled to the office. There is today no central body responsible for support systems and technical infrastructure needs in the Swedish civilian crisis management system. This makes work towards "national" programs aimed at securing Swedish IMINT difficult. The single most important measure Sweden can take to secure access to images and image extracted information for the Swedish crisis management system is to make sure that some body within the Swedish Government Office or within one of the Swedish agencies has overall responsibility for the issues.