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Introduction
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have emerged as an important tool in handling the disaster management, offering a major approach to understanding, mitigating, and responding to natural hazards.
GIS has become a significant tool in hazard mapping, vulnerability assessment, and emergency response preparedness. GIS facilitates hazard mapping by integrating diverse spatial datasets, including topography, land use, and historical hazard occurrences. It also facilitates a platform to find high-risk areas prone to floods, earthquakes, Tsunami, and other hazards, thus helps the policymakers to prioritize resources for mitigation efforts and land-use planning.
Disaster Management
Disaster is an event which causes high damage for the environment, properties and human life. Disaster Management is the science and technology for the proper planning and execution of tacking the disasters. The main aim of the disaster management is the prevention and loss deduction.
Disaster management activity is done through the phases of:
Prediction
Prevention
Mitigation
Emergency Management
Recovery
The applications of past data and geographical concepts and disaster management solutions can help the communities to manage risks effectively. It can be done through:
Situational Awareness: Remote sensing, or the use of satellite imagery and aerial photography provides up-to-date and high-resolution visual data of the affected areas. By integrating this data with GIS, emergency response teams can quickly assess the extent of the disaster, identify impacted areas, and monitor the progression of the event. This situational awareness helps in making informed decisions and allocating resources effectively.
Damage Assessment: Geoinformatics can aid in rapid damage assessment after a natural disaster. By comparing pre-disaster and post-disaster satellite images or aerial photographs, emergency response teams can identify areas of destruction, assess the severity of damage to infrastructure (buildings, roads, bridges), and prioritize rescue and recovery efforts accordingly. This information aids in resource allocation and planning for reconstruction.
Hazard Mapping and Prediction: GIS can do hazard mapping and prediction. By analyzing historical data, topography, and other relevant factors, It can identify areas at high risk of natural disasters, such as flood-prone zones or landslide-prone areas. Remote sensing data, including weather patterns and satellite imagery, is crucial for predicting and tracking the progression of natural events, such as hurricanes, storms, or floods. This information assists emergency response teams in issuing timely warnings and implementing evacuation plans.
Evacuation Planning and Route Optimization: GIS plays a main role in evacuation planning and route optimization. By considering factors like population density, road network, topography, and predicted disaster impact areas, GIS can help identify evacuation routes, determine capacity of evacuation centers, and estimate transportation requirements. It assists emergency response teams in efficiently evacuating people from high-risk areas, ensuring their safety.
Resource Management: GIS is very efficient in resource management during emergency response. By integrating data on available resources (e.g., medical facilities, emergency supplies, temporary shelters) and overlaying it with geospatial information, emergency response teams can quickly identify the nearest resources to affected areas and allocate them accordingly. GIS helps in coordinating logistics, optimizing resource distribution, and minimizing response time.
Communication and Coordination: GIS helps to do communication and coordination among emergency response teams. They enable real-time sharing of geospatial information, such as situation maps, evacuation plans, and resource locations. GIS allows different response teams and agencies to collaborate, exchange data, and make informed decisions based on a common operational picture.
GIS is a highly applied technology for capturing the disaster vulnerability zones, storing the data related to location, checking the data with other layers, and displaying disaster related data related to the particular area of the earth surface.
GIS can show many different kinds of data related with disasters on one map, such as streets, buildings, and vegetation, Land use / Land cover, Geology and so on. This enables people to more easily see, analyze, and understand patterns and relationships between these phenomena.
GIS in tackling Flood:
GIS based Maps are created for mitigating the flood contain the information like Flood affected areas, Drainage networks, Population density distribution, villages or areas having Road connectivity, hospital and clinics situated near flood affected areas. Route map for the disaster-prone areas, Villages without proper road connectivity can be identified.
Tsunami Risk Analysis
A Geographic Information System can detect, locate, monitor the potentially tsunamic events occurring in the oceans. It can also provide storm surge advisories with storm surge heights and inundation extent along the coastal regions. Disaster management technique through GIS can make the coastal community to be prepared for Tsunami emergencies, minimize the loss of life and property, and can ensure structural and systematic approach for creating the community for disaster preparedness.
GIS in the management of Earth quakes
-GIS approach is applied for the identification of earthquake potential areas. Important factors related to earthquakes can be recognized and relative input data layers such as Digital Elevation Model, slope, earthquake magnitude, epicenter location, lineaments, faults, distance to active faults and epicenter) are developed to for the disaster mitigation.
-The satellite images such as Sentinel-2 and data from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) earthquake data, and geological data are used in GIS for disaster management.
-For data integration in GIS, a numerical ranking scheme can be adopted to establish rank values for each factor for the appraisal of earthquake potential index (EPI) map. The final earthquake potential index map can classify the study region into different corresponding potential classes such as high, moderate, low, and very low. The earthquake potential map produced for any region can be compared with the previous seismic hazard maps derived from traditional techniques. The use of various parameters and implementation of the suggested method in a particular region using GIS can produce Earth quake Disaster mitigation and management plans.
Conclusion
GIS provides mechanism for integrating and analyzing data from various sources across time, for planners, decision makers, Government and so on. GIS is a crucial technology for emergency management, it has the ability to transform potential disasters in order to solve severe issues and reduce catastrophic repercussions.