Earthquake damage assessment based on remote sensing data. The Haiti case study

Abstract

Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake on 12 January 2010. Timely triggering of the Earth Observation satellites, and absence of cloud cover, allowed to acquire very high-resolution satellite imagery over the main affected areas within a few hours of the disaster. ITHACA performed a first damage assessment based on remotely sensed data, to support the emergency response activities carried out by the humanitarian agencies. This paper aims to highlight not only the adopted methodology and the main cartographic outputs, but also the operational procedures required to make well known analysis techniques effective in an application context.

Automatic three-dimensional features extraction: The case study of L'Aquila for collapse identification after April 06, 2009 earthquake

“…Clearly, the proposed methodology must be tested more widely on this and other post seismic scenarios; nonetheless, this study determined that the detection of post-earthquake collapsed buildings can be substantially enhanced by combining these two techniques, resulting in a complete detection of observable collapsed buildings with no errors (from the studied subset). This methodology, therefore, could allow a first damage assessment to be performed quickly in a completely automated way through the use of remotely sensed data, thereby offering ready support for the emergency response activities carried out by humanitarian agencies (Boccardo et al, 2011).To achieve an effective application of such methodologies, a prearranged preparation of the necessary pre-event data is of strategic importance, as is the availability of high-performance hardware to quickly execute classification and DSM extraction in immediate post events.…”

Rapid Mapping: geomatics role and research opportunities

“…Currently post-event information extraction from remote sensed imagery is performed by means of automatic and/or semi-automatic procedures for limited types of events (e.g., in case of floods, as described in Ajmar et al 2008) as well as through CAPI (e.g., for earthquake damage assessment, as highlighted in Ajmar et al 2011a).…”

Can the Future EnMAP Mission Contribute to Urban Applications? A Literature Survey

“…After a disaster occurs, urban remote sensing can support mapping of the damage [83], for example the damage assessments after the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 [84] or the contributions to risk assessment following the Earthquake in West Sumatra and the Mentawai Tsunami 2010 [85]. Frequent temporal coverage is advantageous for this application, because it enables a comparison of the situation before and after a disaster.…”