Abstract
Rapid assessment of natural disasters is essential for disaster analysis and spatially explicit strategic decisions of post-disaster reconstruction but requires timely available data. The recent daily data of the National Polar-Orbiting Partnership Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP-VIIRS) day/night band (DNB) provide new opportunities to detect and evaluate natural disasters. Here, we introduce an application of NPP-VIIRS DNB daily data for rapidly assessing the damage of a severe typhoon that struck the urban agglomerations along the western Taiwan Straits in China. Our research explored the methods of rapid identification and extraction of the areas based on changes in nighttime light (NTL) after the typhoon disaster by using a statistical radiation-normalization method. We analyzed the correlations of NTL image derivatives with human population, population density, and gross domestic product (GDP). The strong correlations were found between NTL image light density and population density (R2 = 0.83) and between the total nighttime light intensity and GDP (R2 = 0.96) at the prefecture level. In addition, we examined the interrelationships between changes in NTL images and the areas affected by the typhoon and proposed a method to predict the affected population. Finally, the affected area and the affected population in the study area could be rapidly retrieved based on the proposed remote sensing method. The overall accuracy was 83.2% for the detection of the affected population after disaster and the recovery rate of the affected area was 86.9% in the third week after the typhoon. This research demonstrates that the NTL image-based change detection method is simple and effective, and further explains that the NPP-VIIRS DNB daily data are useful for rapidly assessing affected areas and affected populations after typhoon disasters, and for timely quantifying the degree of recovery at a large spatial scale.
Highlights
A typhoon is an extreme weather event with excessive destructive force [1] and is one of the most serious natural disasters on Earth
We investigate the interrelationships of the affected area derived with nighttime light (NTL) data with the area and population affected by the typhoon reported from other sources
The changes in NTL caused by a strong typhoon disaster provide valuable information about the disaster, which can be extracted by detecting changes in NTL images before and after the typhoon disaster
Summary
A typhoon is an extreme weather event with excessive destructive force [1] and is one of the most serious natural disasters on Earth. The annual economic losses and casualties caused by typhoon disasters in this region are enormous [2]. The super-typhoons, characterized by strong winds, heavy rainfall, and storm surges, which can cause extremely high loss of lives and widespread damage to properties and infrastructures, have been widely investigated [4,5]. A rapid assessment of the situation is necessary after any typhoon disasters. Such a rapid assessment refers to the rapid estimation and prediction of disaster-related losses after a typhoon. The timely availability of disaster information is important in this case
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