Using Remote Sensing to Manage Cyclones
Edward Morrison
Sohel Rana conducted a study in Barguna, Bangladesh to improve the effort to minimize loss of life and property damage durring cyclone disasters. The Idea was to improve city planning, ressponce, incident mapping, and triage.
Dr. Rana developed a model for the sorm surge of the area, determined what areas had the most flooding and casuallties to create a map of expected risk.
The risk map Dr. Rana made, used population density and travel distance to find new shelter locations.
To calculate the population density Pan sharpened ALOS/AVNIR-2 images where used to draw village boundaries.
A union between total population and flood levels created a vulnerability map.
Since chances of survival are different deppending on the type of population you need create a map showing where they live (women, children, men, the elderly).
the Vunerability map calculates probability * vunerability * population density.
Finally the risk map can be used to make planing decisions like where to build shelters or reinforce walls
Barguna district is situated at the south-western part of Bangladesh, on the south bounded by the Bay of Bengal. From the historical data, it is seen that during the years 1797 to 2009, Bangladesh has been hit by 65 severe cyclones, 35 of which were accompanied by storm surges.
