Skills needed to identify supernova being applied to help workers delivering supplies to avoid flooded areas

Astro-skills used to spot supernovas and spiral galaxies will soon be deployed in disaster relief efforts to help humanitarian aid workers in Sudan.

The northeast African country endures recurring flooding which has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more over the last few years, leaving them homeless and with little to no food.

Scientists from Lancaster University are now preparing to roll out a new project—which has grown out of a citizen science platform—to help aid workers avoid flooded areas when delivering supplies in Sudan.

Astrophysicist Dr. Brooke Simmons has been leading the humanitarian and disaster relief efforts in the Zooniverse since 2014, after realizing that the skills needed to identify a new supernova are the same as those required to spot the features that are most important to responders and decision makers, such as road blockages and structural damage.

The platform gives members of the public the opportunity to help by identifying patterns in datasets that are too big for experts to examine themselves and too complex for computer algorithms and AI to label reliably.

"Humans are very good at spotting things like complex spiral patterns in galaxies, or which of the changes between nightly images of the same part of the sky have a real exploding star in them, amidst any of the other things that can change, like a satellite passing overhead or a random cosmic ray hitting the detector," said Dr. Simmons, who presented her work at this month's National Astronomy Meeting in Hull.

"In crisis mapping you ignore changes like debris in a field that's nowhere near a building or road, and only mark the things responders need to know about.

"The details are different, but the fundamental task is the same as in our astrophysical citizen science projects, or Zooniverse projects in other research fields."

Now those same skills are being used to help create a map of road and riverbed crossings in Sudan, where the road network is crossed by riverbeds which flood during the rainy season.

It is very hard to predict which riverbeds will be flooded on any given day during the rainy season, which means that humanitarian workers too often have to abort a trip to deliver aid, wasting time and resources.

"Our first task in this project is to create a very thorough map of road-riverbed crossings in Sudan. We know where the roads are, but the wadi map is incomplete, so we are asking volunteers to mark the crossings and to measure the lengths of roads that are crossed by the riverbeds," Dr. Simmons said.

"That will help humanitarian workers assess how severe future flooding might be, across the whole area they are trying to bring aid to.

"That task by itself will be very valuable for aid workers. Once the rainy season gets going this year, we are hoping to use the road-riverbed map to identify areas where we can focus monitoring efforts."

"The plan is to continue the project by asking volunteers to regularly check new imagery that's available and see if we can rapidly identify new flooding in time to help aid workers on the ground plan their travel routes."

The team, including Lancaster's Humanitarian Outreach Officer Alice Mead, are working on the project with Logistics Cluster, a group of organizations coordinating the humanitarian logistics efforts in Sudan under the auspices of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

"Through coordination cells in Nairobi, Port Sudan, and N'Djamena, the Logistics Cluster is providing vital logistics information management and coordination support to partner organizations," Dr. Simmons said.

"The cluster has plotted over 200 wadis on LogIE (Logistics Information Exchange) along key supply routes that are likely to be affected during the rainy season and has developed a regional map showing the estimated physical access constraints that will be faced in Sudan, Chad, and South Sudan during peak rainy season to support supply chain and access strategies."

Mead added, "We have worked closely with Logistics Cluster to identify the key need that the Zooniverse can help them meet, and we are excited to be partnering with them.

"This is a way of enabling the public to provide vital help even if they're far from Sudan and even if they can't, for example, make a financial donation."

Provided by Royal Astronomical Society