Remote Sensing and the roles it plays in showing the effects of Natural Disasters.

 Post-Fire Evaluation of the Effects of Fire on the Environment using Remotely-Sensed Data

"Researchers working in different regions and ecosystem types have developed a variety of applications for satellite and airborne remote sensing data to monitor the post-fire environment. These studies have focused on assessing characteristics of the site immediately after the occurrence of a fire (measures of fire severity) as well as monitoring how a site recovers from the effects of a fire (burn severity). While most of this research has focused on using data from the visible and reflected infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, studies have also been carried out using microwave data. Approaches have focused on quantifying patterns of fire and burn severity, monitoring specific post-fire surface characterististics such as soil moisture, and assessing vegetation regrowth after a fire,. Most research to date has focused on developing approaches to use satellite data to assess the immediate impacts of fire on the environment, and the results from these studies are reviewed here. In this paper, I also present examples from my own research in Alaska to illustrate recent research on using satellite remote sensing data to monitor the impacts of fire. While these test cases are for a specific biome, they illustrate the challenges and opportunities for using remote sensing data to monitor the post-fire environment in any region. Specifically, I present test cases that: (a) demonstrate the difficulties associated with using the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to generate maps of fire severity in boreal forests; (b) show how imaging radar data can be used to assess patterns of soil moisture in burned black spruce forests; and (c) how MODIS data can be used to detect shifts in post-fire forest successional patterns that result from variations in fire severity."