Abstract
Major disasters typically impact large areas, cause considerable damages, and result in significant human and economic losses. The timely and accurate estimation of impacts and damages is essential to better understand disaster conditions and to support emergency response operations. Geo-information drawn from various sources at multi spatial-temporal scales can be used for disaster assessments through a synthesis of hazard, exposure, and post disaster information based on pertinent approaches. Along with the increased availability of open sourced data and cooperation initiatives, more global scale geo-information, including global land cover datasets, has been produced and can be integrated with other information for disaster dynamic damage assessment (e.g., impact estimation immediately after a disaster occurs, physical damage assessment during the emergency response stage, and comprehensive assessment following an emergency response). Residential areas and arable lands affected by the flood disaster occurring from July to August 2015 in Myanmar were assessed based on satellite images, GlobeLand30 data, and other global open sourced information as a study case. The results show that integrating global open geo-information could serve as a practical and efficient means of assessing damage resulting from major disasters worldwide, especially at the early emergency response stage.
Highlights
Major disasters pose global challenges [1] around the world because they typically affect large areas and can have impacts that cross national borders, and because they typically incur considerable damages to residents, societies, and economic systems
Global open geo-information and other information drawn from multiple sources, including formats of different levels and scales based on appropriate integration approaches, could be used to estimate the extent of damage involved, and to observe spatial and temporal patterns for disaster damage assessments that support disaster management in instructive and effective ways [3]
Degrees of damage are typically defined by integrating affected elements with damage level information by sampling post-quantitative damage information for certain points or small-scale areas through high resolution remote sensing, crowdsourcing information, or field surveys, and deducing the damages incurred to an entire area by extrapolation or interpolation
Summary
Major disasters pose global challenges [1] around the world because they typically affect large areas and can have impacts that cross national borders, and because they typically incur considerable damages to residents, societies, and economic systems. And accurate assessments of damage are critical to better understand the overall impacts of disasters and to support more scientific decision making that can guide emergency rescue, relief, and reconstruction efforts. Disaster assessments involve the use of dynamic processes determined based on different emergency stages, accessible data sources, and outcome accuracies, and can be divided into three types: rapid impact estimations, physical damage assessments, and comprehensive assessments. Comprehensive disaster assessments are conducted based on thorough and detailed datasets using multiple approaches, including ground surveys, when disaster conditions are stable and when emergency response operations are ending, which can sometimes occur after several months [6,7], in turn producing accurate and thorough outcomes for further recovery and reconstruction planning. As more data become available with the passage of time after a disaster occurs, the accuracy and covered area of a physical damage assessment improves
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