Remote Sensing for Natural or Man-Made Disasters and Environmental Changes

Abstract

Disasters can cause drastic environmental changes. For managing the disasters and to assess their environmental impacts a large amount of spatial data is required. Earth observation data offer independent coverage of wide areas for a broad spectrum of crisis situations. It provides information over large areas in near-real-time and supplementary at short-time and long-time intervals. Therefore remote sensing can support disaster management in various applications. In order to demonstrate the efficacy but also the limitations of remote sensing technologies for disaster management, a number of cases studies are presented, including applications for flooding in Germany 2013, earthquake in Nepal 2015, forest fires in Russia 2015 and searching for the Malaysian aircraft 2014. The discussed aspects comprise data access, information extraction and analysis, management of data and its integration with other data sources, product design, and organisational aspects.