Monitoring and early warning systems – a design for human survival

Technical means now exist to monitor, predict a danger and issue early warnings when something devastating is estimated to happen in the human environment. In order to adapt such means for the benefit of humanity, existing monitoring methods, basic system design principles and natural short and long environmental transformations were investigated. Finally an integrated automatic system for deformation monitoring and surveying of the Chernobyl disaster area, was proposed. The conclusion was that airborne remote sensing including GPS and photogrammetry can be considered the optimum solution.