Application of Satellite Remote Sensing in the Field of Disaster

Prevention Its Possibility and Expectation

Abstract

Disasters are originated through very complicated processes in which various conditions and causes are interrelated each other. These conditions and causes are distinguished into two categories, namely, primary cause and inducement.
The primary cause includes natural and artificial conditions subject to natural hazards, and the inducement means various natural hazardous phenomena to cause disasters.
The informations expecting to be obtained from satellite remote sensing are the ones concerning to the above mentioned primary cause and inducement of wide area, periodic or real time nature which are hardly obtained effectively and economically by the traditional means for observation, measurement and investigation.
These informations will be very useful for the technological improvement of three important aspects in disaster prevention as follows: the first is watching and forecasting unusual natural phenomena, the second is exact holding the actual state of a disaster and the third is the estimation of a disaster by exact holding primary cause and inducement likely to occur.
The significance of satellite remote sensing in the field of disaster prevention exists in the improvement and promotion of scientific and technological capabilities for the three aspects mentioned above.
In this report, the author describes various possibilities and expectations on the application of satellite remote sensing in the field of disaster prevention based on many studies carried out or carried on in and outside of country.
As to the first aspect, watching and forecasting for storm rainfall and flash flood, snow coverage and thawing, iceberg, huge volcanic eruption and diffusion of volcanic ash cloud into atmosphere, big forest fire, etc. by means of geosynchronous and orbital satellite data are emphasized. Further, the effectiveness of marine observation in the future by means of active remote sensors such as altimeter, scatterometer and synthetic aperture radar is stressed.
For the second aspect, some case studies using Landsat MSS data carried out by the author and his colleagues in the National Research Center for Disaster Prevention are mainly described.
The studies include detection of the damage of rice fields due to flooding in the lower Ishikari River basin in 1981 and in Kumamoto Plain in 1982, detection of the coverage of volcanic products due to the eruptions of Ontake Volcano in 1979 and of Miyakejima Volcano in 1983, and detection of landslides due to heavy rainfalls and earthquakes occurred during 1978 to 1984.
The effectiveness and usefulness of Landsat MSS data are demonstrated by showing the good coincidence of the analytical results with ground truth data.
Concerning to the third aspect, the author describes his ideas how to utilize remote sensing data in this aspect in which estimation methods of disasters such as flood, landslide, volcanic eruption and erathquake are outlined.
He put an emphasis on the synthetic use of extracted informations from remote sensing data with other various informations necessary for the estimation of disasters.