Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

According to a successful disaster management the analysis of the disaster is needed. For this purpose the documentation of the disaster is necessary. Up to now many studies deal with different aspects of mobile systems for the disaster management. They are developed for disaster management activities of public safety units, but there are no applications for the documentation process during and after a disaster. In this paper we describe an approach for a mobile disaster documentation system. The main focus lies on the user requirements of the different user groups. The disaster documentation focuses mostly on information about a disaster and possible activities undertaken by disaster and public safety experts. The documentation structure should use a common language based on a standard terminology. A standardized documentation structure would help to harmonize the information basis, accessibility, and better integration in spatial decision-making processes.

With each passing day, catastrophe risk for urban regions of the world is increasing. One of these catastrophes is the earthquake and recent events in Northridge and Kobe were typical examples of what can happen when a major earthquake strikes directly under a densely populated area. Mega cities created by the rapid urbanization and development in unsafe areas led to far greater losses experienced in the past. In order to reduce the property losses after an earthquake a quick repair process is a major task. This process must be based on detailed plans for rebuilding or strengthening procedures of the buildings. The major damage loss is caused by earthquakes.

Geodetic science plays an important role in the earthquake research. By means of long-term measurement, deformations caused by the breakage of the earth crust caused by the moving plates can be examined. Photogrammetry and Information System techniques are new tools in the earthquake research. Terrestrial photogrammetric methods have been used for the first time to document the damages after an earthquake in Friaul, Italy. There are many attempts to use photogrammetry, remote sensing and information sciences in the earthquake damaged areas. Some of them are related with the earthquake prediction, long and short term, some of them is related to the damage recording and assessment. A similar study to this research is the work after the Kobe earthquake.

In all these studies they claim of data collection as well as before or after an earthquake. Earlier earthquakes revealed problems in the processes of documenting and analyzing the building damage that occurred due to earthquake disasters which demanded much effort in terms of time and man power. The main difficulties appeared because analogue damage assessments created a great variety of unstructured information that had to be put in a line to allow further analysis. Apart from that, documentation of damage effects was not detailed and could only be carried out on the spot of a disaster.

On 26 December 2004 a strong earthquake with an epicenter west of the coast of Sumatra generated a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The earthquake had a magnitude of 9, which makes it a rare event since earthquakes greater than magnitude 8.5 have occured about once every 10 years since 1900 according to [5]. The last time a tsunami was generated by a magnitude 9 earthquake was on Good Friday 1964 off the coast of Alaska. The Sumatra earthquake and the tsunami that followed caused many victims in the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean. At the time of writing the death toll stands at 225000, which is an incredible number that is changing by the day. This article discusses two unique scientific aspects related to the earthquake and the tsunami. Four satellite altimeters picked up the traveling wave in the Indian Ocean, evidenced by the fact that a tsunami model matches the satellite observations. Early GPS observed displacements at a few sites in the Sumatra, Thailand, Malaysia region confirm the predictions of a geophysical model.

Natural and man-made disasters lead to challenging situations for the affected communities, where comprehensive and reliable information on the nature, extent, and the consequences of an event are required. Providing timely information, however, is particularly difficult following sudden disasters, such as those caused by earthquakes or industrial accidents. In those situations only partial, inaccurate or conflicting ground-based information is typically available, creating a well-recognized potential for satellite remote sensing to fill the gap. Despite continuous technical improvements, however, currently operational, non-classified, space-based sensors may not be able to provide timely data. In addition, even high spatial resolution satellites (< 1m) are limited in their capacity to reveal true 3D structural damage at a level of detail necessary for appropriate disaster response in urban areas.

Uncalibrated oblique airborne imagery, both video and photography, is typically the first data type available after any given disaster in an urban setting, usually captured by law enforcement or news agencies. In this study we address the use of video data for systematic, quantitative, and near-real time damage assessment, using video and auxiliary data of an in dustrial disaster in 2000 in Enschede, the Netherlands, and of Golcuk, Turkey, acquired after the 1999 Kocaeli (or Marmara) earthquake.

We focus in particular on texture-based damage mapping based on both empirical and more generic, geometric indicators. Data-specific attributes included color indices and edge characteristics, while the data-independent approach included rotation invariant Local Binary Pattern and contrast operators (LBP/C). In an earlier step of the project, an interface was created to allow the near-real time processing of video streams, and, depending on positional information encoded with the data, their combination with auxiliary data such as maps or pre-disaster image data. Here we further investigated the potential of the available imagery for 3D reconstruction of the disaster area. Correspondences between consecutive video frames were established automatically by feature point tracking and used for the estimation of the coordinates of the terrain points as well as the camera parameters. Furthermore, we quantitatively assessed the quality of the reconstruction based on the data available. The ultimate goal of the project is to establish a versatile processing platform that supports extraction of such information as well as damage mapping, but also partial 3D reconstruction and integration of pre-event GIS and other auxiliary data.

Mankind is putting increasing pressure on the one and only Earth his race has to share, not only by sheer numbers but also, unfortunately, wasteful lifestyle. Those numbers and that lifestyle are causing many areas to become rapidly more vulnerable to a wide range of technological, environmental and natural hazards. It is generally agreed that the availability of proper geo-data is crucial for the entire management cycle of disasters. The Geo-information technology community has produced and continues to produce floods of airborne, space-borne and other accurate, timely and detailed data. All these data are well suited as sound foundation for disaster management. The Geo-information technology community has also developed and continues to develop sophisticated technology to process and analyse the data in order for it to arrive at the right information at the right time and to disseminate it to the right persons. The present paper provides backdrops on the abilities of airborne and space-borne sensors for managing natural disasters.

Geographical Information Systems applications are used daily within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS-NET) to provide relevant meteorological and climatic information to support weather-related natural disaster management efforts (Love, 2004). It is through the use of GIS technologies that a more user friendly, value-enhanced, and distinctly directed set of information may be created and disseminated to the end user. However; the data flow cycle does not end there. Users will ingest this information and modify it for their own purposes, resulting in a new product possibly benefiting the original institution. It is the purpose of this paper to inform the disaster management community of our experience with weather and climate related GIS technology in order to gain critical feedback in the direction of improving the data and services we provide and to add to the common pool of GIS knowledge. Within this document, examples of manual and automated Climate Prediction Center’s FEWS-NET products will form the base of the discussion. History of GIS use within FEWS-NET will provide background information, while a discussion of our experience determining user requirements will give a view into the task at hand. A summary of possible future directions will culminate the report.

The aim of this paper is to present the first results of a research project entitled: Strengthening Local Authorities in Risk Management (SLARIM). The main objective of this project is to develop a methodology for spatial information systems for municipalities, which will allow local authorities to evaluate the risk of natural disasters in their municipality, in order to implement strategies for vulnerability reduction. The project concentrates on medium-sized cities in developing countries, which do not yet utilize Geographic Information Systems in their urban planning, and which are threatened by natural hazards (such as earthquakes, flooding, landslides and volcanoes). The methodology concentrates on the application of methods for hazard assessment, elements at risk mapping, vulnerability assessment, risk assessment, and the development of GIS-based risk scenarios for varying hazard scenarios and vulnerability reduction options, using structural and/or non-structural measures. In the development of elements at risk databases use is made of interpretation of high-resolution satellite imagery, combined with extensive field data collection, using mobile GIS. Although the methodology is primarily designed to assist municipalities in the decision-making regarding vulnerability reduction strategies, the resulting databases are designed in such a way that they can also be utilized for other municipal activities. Within the project a number of case study cities have been identified. Here results are presented on earthquake loss estimation for the city of Lalitpur in Nepal, for buildings and for population losses. Databases have been generated of the buildings of the city, and of the subsurface conditions. Soil response modeling was carried out and vulnerability curves are applied to estimate the losses for different earthquake scenarios.

The danger of a rock fall or rockslide event is omnipresent, mainly due to dense settlement, excessive land usage even in alpine regions, and the global warming. In the case of a rock fall event the rapid operational availability of a measurement system is important for disaster management to assess the risk and to take appropriate measures.

The evaluation and classification of instable surfaces need fast and cheap automatic sensing methods with accuracy in the range of a few centimetres. It is shown that a terrestrial laser scanning system is able to successfully perform an efficient change survey.

We report on the sensor and software set-up, the logistics, and the procedure for data evaluation to perform the proposed monitoring task. The system (Laser scanner LPM-2k produced by Riegl Laser Measurement Systems, Austria, combined with software for scanning and data evaluation by JOANNEUM RESEARCH and DIBIT Messtechnik GmbH, Austria) is capable of automatically detecting changes and motion on the surface of an active rockslide area.

A recent study carried out by the French Civil protection with support of Italy and Spain, reviewed the current usage of new technologies for civil protection, in particular for rescue operations (Béquignon and Nardin 2004). The technologies considered here were Geographical Information Systems, GPS and other locating devices, telecommunications, satellite and airborne remote sensing. A number of challenges were identified for further development. The paper will provide some examples and discuss related issues.

The Federal Crisis Centre in Belgium was created in 1988 in the aftermath of a series of tragic events during the 80’s. Its mission is to manage crisis situations at national level: floods, nuclear incidents, chemical pollutions, major strikes, risks for food chains, terrorist threats etc. It consists of 60 professionals, fulfilling their mission 24h a day, offering to partners a “high tech” and ready to use environment for crisis management.

The Crisis Center introduced GIS-technology in the early 90’s mainly as a mapping tool to help decision-makers. Today, the aim of Gis is to collect and maintain as many critical data’s as possible, normalized and integrated in a system that is continuous, homogenous and regularly updated. This allows us to produce thematic maps as well as case studies showing spatial analyses, disaster consequences, risk distribution for our partners dealing with crisis management. Our strategy regarding Geo-information technologies can be summarized as follow: in management of base maps, setup of where geographical objects are linked to external databases, easy to use customized mapping functions for our own needs, with other bodies in order to make data exchanges easier especially with local authorities.