The Kamal Ewida Earth Observatory: A NATO supported real-time remote sensing receiving station being established in Egypt with HPC-enabled near-real-time data products for mitigation of environmental & public health disasters

Establishment of the Kamal Ewida Earth Observatory (KEEO) has been funded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Science for Peace Program. KEEO is a joint initiative of two of Egypt´s largest and most venerable institutions of higher learning, Cairo University and Al Azhar University, both based in Cairo, Egypt, in collaboration with established environmental observatories in two NATO countries, Turkey and the USA. Specifically, the Egyptian partners, based in their Departments of Meteorology and Astronomy, Faculty of Science, at the two Egyptian Universities, are engaging in applications development, research and instructional collaboration with partnering resources from Bogaziçi University´s Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute (Istanbul, Turkey), with expertise in disaster mitigation, and Purdue University´s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing´s Purdue Terrestrial Observatory (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA), with expertise in real-time remote sensing and multi-disciplinary applications of satellite data. The KEEO project provides an interdisciplinary approach to effective disaster management and facilitates collaborative research and decision support, within the Egyptian context, for disaster mitigation.