The University of San Carlos, through the Center for Geoinformatics and Environmental Solutions (CenGES) and in partnership with the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA), conducted a workshop on Remote Sensing Data for Air Pollution Monitoring and Management on September 25–27, 2024 at the USC Talamban Campus.

This workshop was made possible by the United Nations Secretariat of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), and the Korean National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER). 

The three-day workshop aimed to: 

• Enhance the Philippines’ capacity to strengthen the national air pollution monitoring and management; 
• Build the network of users in the Philippines to effectively use Pandora and the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) data; and 
• Survey the need for the Pandora spectrometer. 

The event was attended by professionals, practitioners, and staff members in national environmental space-related agencies or departments (including the Department of Environment and Natural Resources) relevant to air pollution and management in the Philippines. 

According to Roland Emerito S. Otadoy, Ph.D., USC CenGES head, the data provided by GEMS “will improve the accuracy of air quality forecasts, top-down emission rates, and understanding of long-range transport of air pollutants.” For the last few years, he has been involved in the discussion on the proposed air pollution monitoring across Asia using geostationary satellites.

The workshop was conducted in USC since the University of San Carlos is one of the sites identified for the installation of the Pandora instrument (see related story).