System architecture of the Mediterranean Dialogue Earth Observatory

A Mediterranean Dialogue Earth Observatory project is under implementation in Morocco. It is led by a group of experts from Turkey, Morocco and the USA. The objective of the project is to facilitate early warning and mitigation of a wide range of biogenic and anthropogenic disasters using remote sensing techniques. Some examples are flooding, storms, forest fires, climate change, recent public health incidents, such as malaria and avian influenza. The observatory comprises a network of real-time satellite remote sensing ground stations, installed at two universities in Morocco, Abdelmalek Essadi and AlAkhawayn, with a geostationary system to collect data from Meteosat geostationary satellite and a tracking station for polar orbiting satellites. The infrastructure includes as well the post processing computer clusters and relevant storage, software and distributional network. Archival and real-time remote sensing utilizing high performance computing clusters, are planned throughout the life cycle of disaster management. In this paper, a description of ground stations will be given, as well as the antennas connectivity and the access to data from partnering universities and collaborating end-users.