Every picture tells a story, but what is the interval between a disaster and the story remote sensing can tell to emergency workers?

Image based mapping products are useful as a proxy indicator of impact in the early stages of an emergency. Whilst remotely sensed data cannot determine the exact extent to which individuals have been affected, or provide guidance regarding their specific needs, it can be useful for preliminary damage analysis that can lead to rough estimates of the affected population. Such estimates can be critical in the early stages of a relief effort, for identifying the likely scale of the required relief effort, and to feed into requests for donor funding - until such time when the results of field assessments can be used to obtain directly observed data.

The window of opportunity in which such estimates are useful is limited. The utility depends directly upon the timeliness with which satellite data is captured, processed and products made available to key players in a position to quickly instigate such an analysis. Organisations directly involved in the information flow at a field level are in a unique position to facilitate this process, and ensure that results are disseminated to all relevant actors within the relief response.

This talk will present a view of the value of remote sensing in crisis and disaster response, referring to experiences gained from the field over the past year, including mega disasters such as the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2010 Pakistan Floods. The discussion is set in the context of: (i) the immediate aftermath of sudden-onset disasters, typically over one to three weeks; (ii) supporting the response of the humanitarian community, involving local/national authorities, UN agencies and NGOs; (iii) a focus on remotely sensed data and derived vector products.