2017 Volume 83 Issue 4 Pages 126-133
Since the 1970s, a large variety of environmental information such as land cover, land surface temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, and air pollution have been acquired from the space by earth observation satellites. The acquired information plays a significant role in epidemiological analysis in cases wherein in situ data are unavailable or sparsely available. This paper reviews the utilization of satellite-derived environmental information for epidemiological analysis of heat-wave-related diseases, vector-borne infectious diseases, and air pollution-related diseases. This paper also introduces a user-friendly web-based system, which is being developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, to distribute satellite-derived environmental information including precipitation, solar radiation, land surface temperature, aerosol optical depth, normalized difference vegetation index, soil moisture, and topographic data. The system provides the data which can be utilized for epidemiological analysis on the basis of specific geographic location and period without any additional data processing by users.
