Remote Sensing for Natural or Man-made Disasters and Environmental Changes

Disasters can cause drastic environmental changes. A large amount of spatial data is required for managing the disasters and to assess their environmental impacts. Earth observation data offers independent coverage of wide areas for a broad spectrum of crisis situations. It provides information over large areas in near-real-time interval and supplementary at short-time and long-time intervals. Therefore, remote sensing can support disaster management in various applications. In order to demonstrate not only the efficiency but also the limitations of remote sensing technologies for disaster management, a number of case studies are presented, including applications for flooding in Germany 2013, earthquake in Nepal 2015, forest fires in Russia 2015, and searching for the Malaysian aircraft 2014. The discussed aspects comprise data access, information extraction and analysis, management of data and its integration with other data sources, product design, and organisational aspects

The Vulnerability of a City - Diagnosis from a Bird’s Eye View

When the tsunami in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004 hit the city of Banda Aceh on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, neither the city administration nor its inhabitants, nor national or international organisations were prepared. Approximately 60.000 of the 260.000 inhabitants died, leaving other 30.000 homeless and causing an enormous impact on the local economy. In the aftermath of this event tsunami early warning system were developed and are operated today (e. g. the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System – GITEWS (Lauterjung, 2005)). However, the problem of earthquake or tsunami prediction in a deterministic sense has not been solved yet (Zschau et al, 2002). Thus, an end-to-end tsunami early warning system includes not only the tsunami warning, but also the assessment of vulnerability, perception studies, evacuation modeling, eventually leading to technical requirements for monitoring stations and recommendations for adaptation and mitigation strategies (Taubenböck et al., 2009a). In this study we address several specific questions on the capabilities of one discipline – remote sensing – for diagnosing the multi-faceted and complex vulnerability of a city: • Which remotely sensed data sets are appropriate analyzing vulnerability in highly complex urban landscapes? • What capabilities and limitations does urban remote sensing have regarding mapping, analysis and assessment of risks and vulnerability? • How can interdisciplinary approaches extend the applicability of earth observation

Remote sensing-based proxies for urban disaster risk management and resilience: A review

© 2018 by the authors. Rapid increase in population and growing concentration of capital in urban areas has escalated both the severity and longer-term impact of natural disasters. As a result, Disaster Risk Management (DRM) and reduction have been gaining increasing importance for urban areas. Remote sensing plays a key role in providing information for urban DRM analysis due to its agile data acquisition, synoptic perspective, growing range of data types, and instrument sophistication, as well as low cost. As a consequence numerous methods have been developed to extract information for various phases of DRM analysis. However, given the diverse information needs, only few of the parameters of interest are extracted directly, while the majority have to be elicited indirectly using proxies. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the proxies developed for two risk elements typically associated with pre-disaster situations (vulnerability and resilience), and two post-disaster elements (damage and recovery), while focusing on urban DRM. The proxies were reviewed in the context of four main environments and their corresponding sub-categories: built-up (buildings, transport, and others), economic (macro, regional and urban economics, and logistics), social (services and infrastructures, and socio-economic status), and natural. All environments and the corresponding proxies are discussed and analyzed in terms of their reliability and sufficiency in comprehensively addressing the selected DRM assessments. We highlight strength and identify gaps and limitations in current proxies, including inconsistencies in terminology for indirect measurements. We present a systematic overview for each group of the reviewed proxies that could simplify cross-fertilization across different DRM domains and may assist the further development of methods. While systemizing examples from the wider remote sensing domain and insights from social and economic sciences, we suggest a direction for developing new proxies, also potentially suitable for capturing functional recovery

Electromagnetic Sensing Techniques for Non-Destructive Diagnosis of Civil Engineering Structures

Environmental policy & protocol