A google earth based distributed infrastructure to support natural disaster response

Forecasting and monitoring earth phenomenon is fundamental to reducing natural disasters hazards. However, how to react after a given disaster occurs is also a key issue that can improve response times and save lives. GISCorps is a program of the urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) that coordinates short-term, volunteer-based GIS services to underprivileged communities. In case of a natural disaster, the GISCorps members volunteer their time to characterize the prior and current status of the affected area (for example doing damage assessment) by the observation of satellites images and ancillary data using Google Earth. This information is crucial since it can help local services carry out better decisions and for scheduling response strategies. This methodology has the main advantage of being simple, easy to schedule and based in uniform and standard formats. However its main drawback is that it lacks scalability and relies only in the level of expertise of the member and his/her knowledge and tools. Current high performance computing and information retrieval techniques can provide to this community powerful features that can speed up and improve their procedures. Furthermore, they can provide value added mechanisms to automatically collect and process data concerning the disaster. This new knowledge can be used by the GIS expert to better identify areas or can be automatically forwarded to the local services. In this paper we propose a grid based new service architecture oriented to improved the GISCorps procedures and improve risk reduction in natural disasters. The main aim of this paper is to present a use case of how the forthcoming technologies can be used in natural disaster scenarios to improve response time and provide better information for the decision making process.