EVALUATION OF HURRICANE 'MITCH' DAMAGES IN CENTRAL AMERICA

摘要

The states of Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador have been toughly hit by the "Mitch" hurricane in the first days of November 1998. The extent of damages due to this hurricane, as well as their impact upon local economy were exceptional. In this framework, a remote sensing project was scrambled to provide a large scale evaluation of the damages suffered by the three countries. To reach this objective, new remote sensing products called DYNAMIC products have been designed. These products are, based on using, either RADAR satellite images, or Optical/RADAR satellite data fusion. The most efficient techniques have been applied to produce these products, thus enabling change detection at a very fine spatial scale (10x10 meters). Project schedule and operations, as well as the validation of its products are reported in this paper.