Mongolia Day 3 - er, will find out what happened to Day 2....

Mongolia Day 3

Start of an intensive day of simluation exercise. MapAction was allocated to the OSOCC and to supply a mapping component. The morning was spent allocating resources and personel. UNOCHA went through a number of presentations, all quite involved on the available collaboration tools available and encouraged all participants to work with these tools.
The exercise was a 6.5 magnitude, 20km south west of Ulaanbaatar. No other information was forthcoming. Initial results were confused indeed; in the beginning exercise, it appeared that emphasis was on two towns close to Ulaanbaatar (Dzumod and Nalayh) but as the exercise shifted it was apparent that the work was to be concentrated around four sites around Ulaanbataar itself.

With only the ESRI world data we started making some brief overviews maps but with 30 minutes go, there was a change in the target locations and the injection of new data. This caused us a lot of bother but we managed to create a very basic overview that was presented to the daily update. We missed most of it as we wanted to continue to refine the map. Sylvie and I continued to fix the map until we were happy with it.
Points:

1. Google Earth is a very suitable platform for very quick maps, especially when the area has been cached before hand and a projector is at hand. We found that quickly annotating a google earth image with the locations of the RDC, OSOCC and other areas was far better than firing up ArcEditor and bringing in vector and raster data.
Also - printing off the GE image (even with the logos) meant maps could be printed out as soon as you have fired up the application.
SRSA are keen to use this more and have been experimenting in all their exercises.
MapAction needs to be get conversant with GE ASAP otherwise we're in danger of being sidelined by hordes of people using GE. GE is better than ArcEditor because it is more accessible, so much faster and has potentially a better coverage than ArcEditor with VMAP data. Certainly, it beats (unfortunately) ArcView in 'quick, dirty' mapping at least on the first day. Once, ArcView gets established in terms of data and templates; then the balance swings. GE also has a tendency to act strangely, mo
Luckily, we held our own as we knew some GE tricks others didnt. We need to run a GE refresher course for those unsure of how this application works.Just to keep up with it.

2.For light deployments, we should still carry with us a DVD containing the base data (VMAP data etc) -- Sylvie and I *thought* we had the data *somewhere* and ended up downloading it from the various website. We missed this before departure - this will be mentioned in the endex report.

All in all, a definite challenge for us with injects by the EXCON to test all aspects of the system. Room for improvement for all and we're looking forward to exercise phase 3.