2007 Volume 23 Issue 2 Pages 119-126
A potential change in climate will increase the number of extreme events. Such events may cause natural disasters and severely affect human lives and agricultural production worldwide. Remote sensing technologies have enabled rapid collection of data where contemporaneous field observations are unavailable or incomplete. The author focuses on satellite remote sensing-based approaches to monitoring and prediction, and outlines methods to estimate environmental parameters and detect and predict natural disasters. This article describes an evaluation of environment, disaster detection and protection against disasters. The scope of evaluation of environment covers from ethology to continental desertification. The scope of disaster detection covers fire, volcanic activity, soil erosion, flood, drought and damage from salty breezes. Many problems still remain as to how to effectively predict a disaster and avert its damage before the disaster actually occurs, using a combination of remote sensing techniques, geographical information system (GIS) and administrative frames.
