GIS and Remote Sensing for Disaster Assessment in Urban Areas

This paper is devoted to the exploitation of remotely sensed and geographic information system (GIS) data in urban areas to obtain a rapid damage assessment after disastrous events, like earthquakes, occurred. The basic idea is that the joint use of these two sources of information will provide a better understanding of the urban scene and allow a faster characterization of the damage patterns, extensions and possibly levels. This is achievable at different scales, as presented in the paper, according to the spatial resolution of the remotely sensed data but also to the quality and quantity of GIS data available. Examples for the Golcuk (Turkey) and Bam (Iran) earthquakes help to understand the advantages and limits of the proposed methodology.