Abstract

Title: Ten Years of Persistence Hard Working - Chinese Natural Disaster Monitoring, Assessment and Emergency Response System Based on Remote Sensing
Remote sensing technology has become the notoriously core means of natural disaster monitoring and assessment. How to make use of remote sensing technology to improve the dynamic monitoring and assessment of natural disasters is a common proposition of disaster prevention and mitigation in all countries of the world. Especially after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, we faced so many difficult problems such as unavailable data, inaccurate information extraction result, lack of whole process assessment, and so on. These problems have highlighted the urgent need of systematic research in the theory methods, key technologies and engineering applications of natural disaster remote sensing dynamic monitoring and evaluation.
After ten years of massive work，some results have been achieved: (1) China has launched small satellite constellations especially for environmental and disaster monitoring and prediction, meanwhile a system of sharing mechanism has been established. Thus, aeronautical data can be quickly acquired in emergency situation. (2) Theoretical framework of disaster remote sensing system has been established, including the formulation of disaster remote sensing standard specifications, the establishment of a classification system for disaster factors and so on. (3) Some novel methods of high accuracy and rapid extraction of disaster information are proposed. Such as, extraction method of dimensional damage information based on machine learning, extraction method of three-dimensional damage information for houses based on multi view images and so on, and the automatic extraction precision of optical image damage information was better than 80%. (4) A comprehensive assessment model of disaster situation is put forward, which integrates the diachronic case, the vulnerability of the carrier, the sampling theory and expert knowledge, and timely, accurate and reliable dynamic evaluation of the whole disaster process is realized. (5) We developed an operational, automatic, real-time disaster monitoring and assessment systems, which is wildly used in disaster reduction department. With the development and application of this system, the timeliness of remote sensing emergency assessment is shortened from a few days to a few hours. The comprehensive assessment time is shortened from 3 months of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake to two weeks of Nepal earthquake (Tibet disaster area) in 2015.

Prof. Dr. LI Deren is a scientist in photogrammetry and remote sensing, with dual membership of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, member of the Euro-Asia International Academy of Science and honorary doctorate of ETH. He is the Professor and PhD supervisor of Wuhan University, Chair of the Academic Committee of Wuhan University and the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing. He was President of the Chinese Society of Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography and President of Hubei Association for Science and Technology (HAST).

In the 1980s, Prof Li was mainly engaged in the studies of observation errors and processing methods in geodesy and photogrammetry. In 1985, he completed theoretical research in the separability of model errors, which advanced the reliability theory to the separability phase. The result of this study received the 1988 Best Paper Award of the German Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and Hansa Luftbild Award. Since 1990, Prof Li has concentrated on the research and education in geo-spatial information science and technology represented by remote sensing (RS), global positioning system (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS). Since 1994, Prof. Li has worked together with his young brother Deyi Li on the theory and application of spatial data mining.

Prof Li served as President of International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Technical Commissions III and VI from 1988-1992 and 1992-1996 respectively. He worked for Committee on Earth Observation Satellites in 2002-2004 and was the first President of Asia GIS Association in 2003-2006. He received the Samuel G. Gamble Award at the ISPRS XXI Congress in 2008 and was elected as an ISPRS Honorary Member at the IPRRS XXII Congress in 2012. He received an award in appreciation and recognition of the outstanding contribution to the success and achievements of the MOST/ESA Dragon Program 2004 -2007. He has received 5 time National Science and Technology Awards in China and also trained 155 doctor students and more than 100 master students in recent 30 years.