GADAS (Global Agricultural and Disaster Assessment System) is a state-of-the-art web-based GIS.
The International Production Assessment Division (IPAD) is part of the Office of Global Analysis (OGA) within the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), an agency within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). FAS-IPAD uses satellite imagery and remote sensing data to assist in its agricultural estimates of global crop conditions. The division provides monthly estimates of area, yield and production for 17 distinct commodities in over 160 countries around the world, including post-disaster assessments. GADAS is a powerful visualization tool based on an ArcGIS platform that enables FAS-IPAD analysts, and other users, to rapidly assess real-time crop conditions using a wide variety of data layers from a multitude of sources.
GADAS integrates a vast array of highly detailed data streams to include daily precipitation data, vegetation index, crop masks, land cover data, irrigation and water data, elevation and infrastructure, political data, and much more. In addition, FAS-IPAD has partnered with the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) in Hawaii to incorporate real-time data streams into GADAS for worldwide monitoring, tracking, and pre- and post-disaster agricultural assessments resulting from hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, floods, droughts, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
You may want to begin exploring GADAS for the many things it can be used for, such as:
Global agricultural monitoring and commodity forecasting
Comparative climatic and satellite-derived vegetation analysis
Environmental change detection studies and analysis
Drought monitoring
Natural disaster assessment and analysis
Tracking current and historical disaster events
Highlighting regional risk posed by natural disasters
Spatial modeling of potential disaster impacts
Delineation of major land-use categories worldwide
Regional planning and climate-resilience studies
Program or project-specific data archive and data mining
