Information Services to Support Disaster and Risk Management in Alpine Areas

The concept for an operational service for natural disaster situations re-quires a scenario driven data access to different sensor information for all phases of a disaster management. This includes also the actual availability of image information of the earth surface concerning the specific require-ments of each phase. From the temporal point of view, spaceborne data acquisition does not offer a sufficient data availability in order to support all different phases in specific crisis situations. Especially the event phase cannot be supported as required.

In this paper we describe a concept for on demand remote sensing image data acquisition and a rapid information flow within a crisis management system, which allows to support the decision making process for different crisis scenarios and user groups in charge. The investigation focuses on an airborne data acquisition platform as well as on the development of a multi platform geo-service framework to improve the risk management capaci-ties in mountainous regions by realizing an integrated pre-operational ser-vice. The demonstrator includes the client applications for building up an overall crisis management system including mobile units, a mobile com-mand centre, web based presentations and open interfaces to other sys-tems. Additionally, it is described how Very High Resolution (VHR) re-mote sensing data could be used in this context. A landslide susceptibility mapping has been performed using airborne LIDAR data and QUICKBIRD satellite imagery.