Damage estimation of the Great East Japan earthquake with airborne SAR (PI-SAR2) data

Author

Satake, Makoto ; Kobayashi, Tatsuharu ; Uemoto, Jyunpei ; Umehara, Toshihiko ; Kojima, Shoichiro ; Matsuoka, Takeshi ; Nadai, Akitsugu ; Uratsuka, Seiho

Author_Institution

Appl. Electromagn. Res. Inst., Nat. Inst. of Inf. & Commun. Technol. (NICT), Koganei, Japan

fYear

2012

fDate

22-27 July 2012

Firstpage

1190

Lastpage

1191

Abstract

A 9.0-magnitude earthquake occurred off the pacific coast of Tohoku area of Japan, in March 2011. Accompanied with the subsequent tsunami, it caused a lot of casualties and damages in the coast area. We conducted urgent observations of the damaged areas with an airborne X-band SAR system, Pi-SAR2, immediately after the earthquake, on March 12 and the following dates. The Pi-SAR2 is a fully polarimetric airborne radar, with high spatial resolution of 0.3 m. We found the high resolution radar images, with multi-temporal observations, are quite useful to estimate the area flooded by the tsunami and its changes. Also found is capability of the polarimetric radar images to estimate the amount of a pile of debris that is one of the greatest concerns for the residents.

Keywords

earthquakes; remote sensing by radar; tsunami; AD 2011 03 12; PI-SAR2 data; Pacific coast; Tohoku area; airborne SAR data; airborne X-band SAR system; damage estimation; damaged area observations; great east Japan earthquake; high resolution radar images; multitemporal observations; polarimetric airborne radar; polarimetric radar images; subsequent tsunami; Earthquakes; Radar polarimetry; Spatial resolution; Synthetic aperture radar; Tsunami; SAR; disaster; polarimetric radar;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2012 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Munich

ISSN

2153-6996

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1160-1

Electronic_ISBN

2153-6996

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2012.6351335

Filename

6351335