Insights on Earth Observation Capabilities in Updating the Spatial Distribution of Exposed Values in Quake-Prone Areas
Harb, Mostapha¹; Dell’Acqua, Fabio^2
1University of Pavia, ITALY; ²EUCENTRE, ITALY

The paper highlight the usage of space borne products to address reliable indicators and ýaggregation methodologies for tracking the dynamic physical exposure of urban areas to ýnatural disasters. The active view of cities due to the population growth and the increasing ýurbanization trends lead to a general risk underestimation. Such a result is particularly ýobserved where urban planning is not considered a priority or in areas of non-frequent ýhazards like earthquakes. The regular consequence of such situation would be people ýindifference to inhibit hazard-prone areas. The critical pointþ þý of creating a guided ýdevelopment is by instantaneously monitoring and controlling it. Mainly the sources for such ýprocess would be either the slow statistical records (Census) or the separate studies that ýmight lack the statistical significance due to several reasons like their restricted areas of ýcoverage, the limited number of specimens or for being a temporal snap shot of the current ýsituation. In addition to that, the problem gets more complicated when we want to consider ýareas with access difficulty or data scarcity. The on-going developments of space borne ýtechnology have created an expanding hole in the wall of time barrier and though enabled ýgetting the necessary geo-information near the real time. The different capabilities of the ýsensors used would allow extracting reliable physical indicators of a wide urban area within ýrelatively short time. The reliable extracted indicators like building size, height, occupancy, ýlocation, and the usage classý, when aggregated using a convenient methodology, would ýenrich the knowledge of the spatial and temporal variation of the physical exposure ýand ýthus increase our precision in developing new generation of risk assessment models. ýMoreover, the foreseen limitation of such monitoring technology like the low accuracy ýcould be counteracted by a convenient integration with ancillary data sources to create a ýmore consistent model. All the above issues are addressed in projects like GEM-IDCT and ýthe FP7 Space SENSUM Project, which will be discussed in the paper.ý