Building damage assessment approach based on seismic spatial information grid

Earthquakes are a sudden natural disaster that seriously endangers the safety of people´s lives and property. Rapid and accurate assessment of earthquake disasters, especially the building damage assessment, is an effective way to reduce the risk of disasters. Compared with traditional methods of GIS-based building damage assessment, which takes the entire stricken region as a whole assessment area, lacks in considering the uneven space-time distribution of damage factors, the seismic spatial information grid (SSIG) method fully considers the spatial and temporal characteristics of seismic data and can give a more accurate and detailed assessment results. SSIG is an earthquake thematic spatial information grid, which has integrated numerous kinds of spatial information technology. In this paper, SSIG has been introduced into building damage assessments. It describes the model and method of building damage assessment based on SSIG. The proposed method was exemplified after the Yushu earthquake in Qinghai province of China. The case application shows that the SSIG-based method can get more accurate assessment results than single GIS-based method.