• Fire Science and Engineering
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.70-75
• /
• 2003

The east coast of Kangwon province has been suffering from natural disaster like wildfire and flooding. In April 2000, there has been a great wildfire in this area. Many forest was burnt out, the mountain was bared. Furthermore, on 31st August,2002 typhoon RUSA attacked the area with heavy rainfall of about 315 mm/day, which resulted in 178 deaths and extensive damage to the property, In this regard, our study was focused on the assessment of the factors of flooding damage considering wildfire disaster. Most of results for our study are derived from practical investigation in the east coast of Kangwon province.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.35 no.4
• /
• pp.517-534
• /
• 2019

In abrupt fire disturbances, high quality images suitable for wildfire damage assessment can be difficult to acquire. Quantifying wildfire burn area and severity are essential measures for quick short-term disaster response and efficient long-term disaster restoration. Planetscope (PS) imagery offers 3 m spatial and daily temporal resolution, which can overcome the spatio-temporal resolution tradeoff of conventional satellites, albeit at the cost of spectral resolution. This study investigated the potential of augmenting PS imagery by integrating the spectral information from Sentinel-2 (S2) differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) to PS differenced Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (dNDVI) using histogram matching,specifically for wildfire burn area and severity assessment of the Okgye wildfire which occurred on April 4th, 2019. Due to the difficulty in acquiring reference data, the results of the study were compared to the wildfire burn area reported by Ministry of the Interior and Safety. The burn area estimates from this study demonstrated that the histogram-matched (HM) PS dNDVI image produced more accurate burn area estimates and more descriptive burn severity intervals in contrast to conventional methods using S2. The HM PS dNDVI image returned an error of only 0.691% whereas the S2 dNDVI and dNBR images overestimated the wildfire burn area by 5.32% and 106%, respectively. These improvements using PS were largely due to the higher spatial resolution, allowing for the detection of sparsely distributed patches of land and narrow roads, which were indistinguishable using S2 dNBR. In addition, the integration of spectral information from S2 in the PS image resolved saturation effects in areas of low and high burn severity.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.36 no.2_1
• /
• pp.179-197
• /
• 2020

Topographic normalization reduces the terrain effects on reflectance by adjusting the brightness values of the image pixels to be equal if the pixels cover the same land-cover. Topographic effects are induced by the imaging conditions and tend to be large in high mountainousregions. Therefore, image analysis on mountainous terrain such as estimation of wildfire damage assessment requires appropriate topographic normalization techniques to yield accurate image processing results. However, most of the previous studies focused on the evaluation of topographic normalization on satellite images with moderate-low spatial resolution. Thus, the alleviation of topographic effects on multi-temporal high-resolution images was not dealt enough. In this study, the evaluation of terrain normalization was performed for each band to select the optimal technical combinations for rapid and accurate wildfire damage assessment using PlanetScope images. PlanetScope has considerable potential in the disaster management field as it satisfies the rapid image acquisition by providing the 3 m resolution daily image with global coverage. For comparison of topographic normalization techniques, seven widely used methods were employed on both pre-fire and post-fire images. The analysis on bi-temporal images suggests the optimal combination of techniques which can be applied on images with different land-cover composition. Then, the vegetation index was calculated from the images after the topographic normalization with the proposed method. The wildfire damage detection results were obtained by thresholding the index and showed improvementsin detection accuracy for both object-based and pixel-based image analysis. In addition, the burn severity map was constructed to verify the effects oftopographic correction on a continuous distribution of brightness values.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.37 no.5_3
• /
• pp.1389-1403
• /
• 2021

Disaster management using VHR (very high resolution) satellite images supports rapid damage assessment and also offers detailed information of the damages. However, the acquisition of pre-event VHR satellite images is usually limited due to the long revisit time of VHR satellites. The absence of the pre-event data can reduce the accuracy of damage assessment since it is difficult to distinguish the changed region from the unchanged region with only post-event data. To address this limitation, in this study, we conducted the wildfire-induced change detection on national wildfire cases using post-fire VHR satellite images and GIS (Geographic Information System) data. For GIS data, a national land cover map was selected to simulate the pre-fire NIR (near-infrared) images using the spatial information of the pre-fire land cover. Then, the simulated pre-fire NIR images were used to analyze bi-temporal NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) correlation for unsupervised change detection. The whole process of change detection was performed on a superpixel basis considering the advantages of superpixels being able to reduce the complexity of the image processing while preserving the details of the VHR images. The proposed method was validated on the 2019 Gangwon wildfire cases and showed a high overall accuracy over 98% and a high F1-score over 0.97 for both study sites.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2022.06a
• /
• pp.923-928
• /
• 2022

Wildfire disasters in the United States impact lives and livelihoods by destroying private homes, businesses, community facilities, and infrastructure. Disaster victims suffer from damaged houses, inadequate shelters, inoperable civil infrastructure, and homelessness coupled with long-term recovery and reconstruction processes. Cities and their neighboring communities require an enormous commitment for a full recovery for as long as disaster recovery processes last. State, county, and municipal governments inherently have the responsibility to establish and provide governance and public services for the benefit and well being of community members. Municipal governments' comprehensive and emergency response plans are the artifacts of planning efforts that guide accomplishing those duties. Typically these plans include preparation and response to natural disasters, including wildfires. The standard wildfire planning includes and outlines (1) a wildfire hazard assessment, (2) response approaches to prevent human injury and minimize damage to physical property, and (3) near- and long-term recovery and reconstruction efforts. There is often a high level of detail in the assessment section, but the level of detail and specificity significantly lessons to general approaches in the long-term recovery subsection. This paper aims to document the extent of wildfire preparedness at the county level in general, focusing on the long-term recovery subsections of municipal plans. Based on the identified challenges, the researchers provide recommendations for better longer-term recovery and reconstruction opportunities: 1) building permit requirements, 2) exploration of the use of modular construction, 3) address through relief from legislative requirements, and 4) early, simple, funding, and the aid application process.