Earth Observation for Natural Disaster relief
Year after year, somewhere on Earth, natural or manmade disasters cause loss of life and widespread destruction, frequently spawning refugee situations. Though the risk of a disaster is low in any one particular place, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, fires, landslides, oil spills, and hurricanes regularly menace people, property, and natural resources.
Major disasters can temporarily make existing maps obsolete, rewriting river boundaries, shorelines, and land features in an instant. When disasters strike and first responders need to understand new situations on the ground, the best source of information often comes from the sky. Satellites, like Landsat, can tell responders what damage disasters have done, providing timely insight into flood extents, fire boundaries, lava flow directions, road traversability, and oil slick movements.
Flood monitoring/assessment
Flooding is one of the most destructive natural disasters, which normally result in adversely sizeable impacts to human and regional economy of affected areas. Due to the sudden occurrence and short-term duration of flood events; the exploitation of multitemporal data is of paramount importance in order to observe and monitor the extent of flood disasters.
Landsat 8 imagery can easily contribute to the development of techniques for mapping flood extent and assessing flood damages through the combination of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) operations in order to improve the efficiency of flood disaster monitoring and management.
Fire monitoring/assessment
While forest fires are a major disaster which destroy forest resources and deprecate the local ecological environment; satellite remote sensing offers a useful tool for fire monitoring, management and damage assessment. Fire affected areas can be discriminated in a remote sensing image due to the strong contrast with the unburned areas. Burn scar maps derived from remote sensing images provide information on the spatial extent and distribution of the fire affected areas, and the total area burned. The burned area, together with land cover information, provide the basis for estimating emission of carbon dioxide and help decision makers to assess the post fire damage to the economy and environment.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Copernicus program adds huge potential with the Sentinel satellites. This family of satellites includes, SAR (Sentinel-1) and multispectral/superspectral (Sentinel 2/3) with global coverage and high spatial and temporal resolution.
If you merge together Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 multispectral data you can reach almost daily coverage (excluding of course cloudy days) of the monitored area.
As you probably imagine by now, there are a lot of theoretical and technical issues to cover in order to actually process and extract valuable information from images taken 600Km above ground! And I haven’t even mentioned the needed software (or in some cases services).
It can be quite hard and chaotic where to start learning. I would suggest first start “googling”. A nice place to start is, as usual, Wikipedia. There are a lot of things to learn and understand “strange” concepts..
My personal suggestion, is to take some online courses (free or paid, depending on your budget and willingness to put effort in learning).
As it comes a bit natural (feel free to check my CV, LinkedIn profile), I would suggest to start your “journey” with GEO University online courses. Here experienced instructors (including myself) present online self paced courses related to Earth Observation (or Remote Sensing) and GIS.
We include theoretical, practical and even software tutorials online courses!
