RedCLARA (Latin America)

When the Latin American Observatory of Extraordinary Events announced in October 2011 that rainfall was expected to be above average for the South American Northwest and above average for the Southeast of the same region, an early alert for floods was issued for Panama, Colombia and Venezuela, and one of a drought for North-western Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. This is an example of how the information gathered and disseminated by the Observatory, a collaboration involving a number of institutions, helps Latin American nations with risk management for extreme environmental events.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.

Launched in April 2015, the first Chilean Virtual Observatory (ChiVO) is an astro-informatic platform for the administration and analysis of massive data coming from the observatories built across the country. Its implementation will provide advanced computing tools and research algorithms to the Chilean astronomical community.