Monitoring of the March 11, 2011, Off-Tohoku 9.0 Earthquake With Super-Tsunami Disaster by Implementing Fully Polarimetric High-Resolution POLSAR Techniques

This paper reflects the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) data utilization for near-real time earthquake and/or tsunami damage assessment in urban areas. In order to show the potential of the fully polarimetric high resolution polarimetric SAR (POLSAR) image data sets, a four-component scattering power decomposition scheme has been developed and applied to monitor near-real time earthquake and tsunami disaster damages. The test site for natural disaster damages has been selected parts of the coastal area affected by the March 11, 2011 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck off Japan’s northeastern coast and triggered a super- tsunami. The color-coded images of the scattering power decomposition scheme are simple and straightforward tool to interpret the changes over the earthquake/tsunami affected urban areas and man-made infrastructures. This method also holds other types of natural (typhoon or tornado) and manmade disaster assessments application. It is found that the double bounce scattering power is the most promising of the input parameters to detect automated disaster affected urban areas at pixel level. It is also observed that the very high resolution POLSAR images are required for superior urban area monitoring over the oriented urban blocks with respect to the illumination of radar