Regional Members Activities

Asian Association on Remote Sensing

The main activity of AARS is to organize the Asian Conference on Remote Sensing (ACRS) every year somewhere in Asian region.
I am pleased to report that Asian Center for Research on Remote Sensing (ACRoRS) was founded in December 1997 with the endorsement of AARS and Asian Institute of Technology (AIT).

1. The 19th ACRS, Manila, Philippines
The 19th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing was held in Manila, Philippines, 16-20 November, 1998, in cooperation with National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA), Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Republic of the Philippines. The total participants were 323 including 134 Filipinos, and the remainder from 22 countries or regions. There were 26 commercial booths and 7 units of commercial presentations (300 US dollars for a unit of 20 minutes).
In conjunction with the conference, two General Conferences were held with the National Delegates of ordinary and associate members. The following decisions were adopted.

• (1) USA (American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) and Germany (University of Hannover) were admitted as Associate Members.
  
• (2) The hosts of the 20th ACRS in 1999 and the 21st ACRS in 2000 were elected.
  The 20th ACRS : Hong Kong, China, 22-26 November 1999
  The 21th ACRS : Taipei, China, 6-10 November 2000
  It was decided to elect the host of the conference two years in advance to provide for better preparation.
  
• (3) The Memorial Book to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ACRS will be published and distributed at the 20th ACRS in Hong Kong, China, in November 1999.
  
• (4) The Proceedings of the conferences should be published on CD ROM with a printed summary on paper from 2000.
  

2. Asian Center for Research on Remote Sensing (ACRoRS)
The ACRoRS was founded in December 1997 with the endorsement of AARS and AIT with the aims of technical support for Asian researchers and consultation services. A new building of the ACRoRS as well as GIS Applications Center (GAC) was constructed in the AIT Campus, Bangkok, Thailand as of the 30th November 1998.
The facilities of the ACRoRS include NOAA AVHRR receiving station, differential real time kinematics GPS, UNIX Workstations, PCs, color plotters etc. An MOU has been concluded between National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) and ACRoRS for providing Japanese Satellite Data to Asian researchers at marginal cost.
Currently several contract researches, NASDA sponsored training courses, visiting researcher program, on-line data dissemination of NOAA AVHRR Data etc. are running successfully.