Earthquake damaged area estimation using DMSP/OLS night-time imagery-application for Hanshin-Awaji earthquake

After the Marmara earthquake disaster in Turkey (Aug.1999), Kohiyama et al. proposed a method to estimate the impacted area of the earthquake using visible and near-infrared (VNIR) satellite imagery provided by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program´s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS), and succeeded in estimating the impacted area of the Marmara earthquake disaster and the Ji-ji earthquake disaster in Taiwan (Sep. 1999) based on their method. They assumed that the brightness of the area would decrease if the buildings collapsed or blackout occurred due to the earthquake. Then, those areas whose brightness decreased significantly after the earthquake compared with before the earthquake were estimated as the impacted area. The purpose of the present study is to check the validity of the above mentioned method by the application for the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (05:46 Jan. 17, 1995) in which the more detailed and various types of damage data due to the earthquake are available as compared with the verification in Turkey