In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, remote sensing technology played a key role in assessing urban damage caused by windstorm, flood and storm surge. This paper provides an overview of techniques employed operationally damage assessment, presenting them within a spatially-tiered reconnaissance framework. Successfully implemented following disasters including the 2003 Bam earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the tiered reconnaissance system provides a theoretical framework for evaluating damage at regional (Tier 1), neighborhood (Tier 2) and per-building (Tier 3) scales. In the case of hurricane Katrina, regional activities included the acquisition and interpretation of PDV footage to provide near real-time multi-hazard impact assessments, and the use of Landsat to evaluate flood extent. At a neighborhood scale, NOAA aerial imagery was used to provide a severity ranking of wind damage and to assess storm surge effects along the Mississippi coast, and a flood boundary within New Orleans was generated from Quickbird satellite imagery. At a per-building scale, a remote sensing-based building damage scale was used to assess windstorm effects in Mississippi. VIEWS field deployments captured georeferenced video of damage throughout Mississippi and New Orleans, which have subsequently served as a benchmark for recovery monitoring and as a database for developing a storm surge damage scale. Results were disseminated in near real-time through Google Earth and MCEER’s daily reports.
Adams, B. J. et al (2006). Deployment of remote sensing technology for multi-hazard post-Katrina damage assessment within a spatially-tiered reconnaissance framework. Fourth International Workshop on Remote Sensing for Post Disaster Response Cambridge, UK.
