Towards integrating multi-sourced sensors for natural disaster management - Case study in flood management

Having access to and usage of real-time spatial information is central for the functioning of natural disaster management, and in particular disaster response. Exiting spatially-enabled solutions for managing urban natural disasters provide no or not sufficient support for time-sensitivity and dynamism underling disaster situation. These approaches mainly suffer from low temporal resolution, incapability of sourcing broad range of required disaster data, accompanied with limited support for automated operations. Incorporating in situ sensing into the disaster management process can potentially address such challenges with providing wide-range of real-time data coupled with automated operations for data acquisition and management. In this research we study the process of integrating multi-sourced sensors for supporting natural disaster management, particularly an urban flood response. The results highlight sensor information integration as a needing emphasis and less focused area in the pathway for sensor data enablement of flood management