NASA predicted Rift Valley fever outbreak
The U.S. space agency says it used an early warning system, more than a decade in development to predict a 2006-07 outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Africa.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers, including Assaf Anyamba, a remote sensing scientist with the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, used a blend of NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measurements of sea surface temperatures, precipitation and vegetation cover to predict when and where an outbreak would occur.
The study's results gave public health officials in East Africa up to six weeks of warning for the outbreak -- a first-of-its-kind prediction, NASA said.
The researchers said they used a satellite-derived vegetation data set that measures the landscape's greenness.
Greener regions have more than the average amount of vegetation, which means more water and more potential habitat for infected mosquitoes.
Greenness describes habitat and represents life,
Anyamba said. Without such systematic, continuous Earth system measurements from satellites, we would not be able to translate the information into outbreak predictions.
The researchers describe their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
UPI
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