Remote assessment of natural hazards

A. S. Victorov

Abstract

Assessing techniques for natural hazards based on the remote sensing data are being developed in several studies. Unfortunately, the obtained results have the following disadvantages: the assessment of natural hazards is primarily qualitative (high, low, etc.); the final result is the allocation of areas varying by the degree of natural hazard. This paper aims to demonstrate approaches to the quantitative assessment of the natural hazards basing on the remote sensing data using the thermokarst process as an example. The completed solution to the problem of remote hazard assessment is based on the approaches of the mathematical morphology of landscapes. Mathematical models of the morphological pattern of the territories with different origin are the base of the assessment. They also give us the information about the development of foci of a hazardous process, the thermokarst in particular. The paper considers two variants of the thermokarst development within the homogenous environment, synchronous and asynchronous starts. The analysis of the models which use the random process theory gives us probability distributions for areas of thermokarst lakes without assuming a circular form of the lakes. Empirical testing at 16 key sites confirms the synchronous start variant. The resulting model allowed us to solve the problem of a quantitative assessment of the impact probability to a linear structure by thermokarst processes. The necessary parameters are determined from repeated remote sensing data.

KEYWORDS: natural hazard assessment, remote sensing, the mathematical morphology of landscapes, modeling the landscape morphological pattern, thermokarst process..

Submitted 13.08.2019, accepted 07.10.2019.

 
Citation: Victorov A. S. (2020), Remote assessment of natural hazards, Russ. J. Earth Sci., 20, doi:10.2205/2020ES000726.
 

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