Methodology for a GIS-based damage assessment for researchers following large scale disasters

The 1990s were designated the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction by the United Nations General Assembly. This push for decrease of loss of life, property destruction, and social and economic disruption brought advancements in disaster management, including damage assessment. Damage assessment in the wake of natural and manmade disasters is a useful tool for government agencies, insurance companies, and researchers. As technologies evolve damage assessment processes constantly evolve as well. Alongside the advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, as well as the growing awareness of the needs of a standard operating procedure for GIS-based damage assessment and a need to make the damage assessment process as quick and accurate as possible, damage assessment procedures are becoming easier to execute and the results are becoming more accurate and robust. With these technological breakthroughs, multi-disciplinary damage assessment reconnaissance teams have become more efficient in their assessment methods through better organization and more robust through addition of new datasets. Damage assessment personnel are aided by software tools that offer high-level analysis and increasingly rapid damage assessment methods. GIS software has advanced the damage assessment methods of these teams by combining remotely sensed aerial imagery, GPS, and other technologies to expand the uses of the data. GIS allows researchers to use aerial imagery to show field collected data in the geographic location that it was collected so that information can be revisited, measurements can be taken, and data can be disseminated to other researchers and the public. The GIS-based data available to the reconnaissance team includes photographs of damage, worksheets, calculations, voice messages collected while studying the affected area, and many other datasets which are based on the type of disaster and the research field. Along with visually mapping the data, geometric calculations can be conducted on the data to give the viewer more information about the damage. In Chapter 4, a tornado damage contour for Moore, Oklahoma following the May 20, 2013 tornado is shown. This damage contour was created in GIS based on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) damage scale, and gives the viewer an easily understood picture of the extent and distribution of the tornado. This thesis aims to describe a foundational groundwork for activities that are performed in the GIS-based damage assessment procedure and provide uses for the damage assessment as well as research being conducted on how to use the data collected from these assessments. This will allow researchers to conduct a highly adaptable, rapid GIS-based damage assessment of their own. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries