International collaboration for the early damaged area estimation system using DMSP/OLS nighttime images

In the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake disaster, the lack of information about where the earthquake damaged areas were prevented early and effective emergency responses and relief. Since then, the national and some local governments in Japan have developed GIS-based damage estimation systems, but few other countries have such systems as yet. Nighttime city lights decreased significantly after a large earthquake, and the DMSP/OLS imagery is suitable for the early estimation of the damaged areas. The damaged areas of the 1999 Kocaeli earthquake in Turkey and 1999 Ji-Ji earthquake in Taiwan were estimated by using DMSP, and the results showed a good match with the real reported damage. We propose a new program through international collaboration to support emergency response and relief activities by providing information as to the estimated impacted areas within the first 24 hours after any significant earthquake. This program consists of the following steps: (1) acquire the earthquake hypocenter data through the Internet, which is for example announced by the USGS. (2) Determine the sampled area of the images by the attenuation formula of earthquake ground motion. (3) Obtain corresponding both time-wise and area-wise DMSP/OLS nighttime images from NOAA/NGDC. (4) Estimate the damaged areas by analyzing the statistically significant decrease in the light intensity of the images. (5) Create a thematic map to present the estimation results as geographic information. (6) Disseminate the resulting map widely and quickly through the WWW