Remote Sensing of Natural and Man-Made Disaster

Dear Colleagues,

An environmentally damaging phenomenon occurring in populated areas, causing losses and destruction, is called a disaster. Although individual disasters occur in different spatiotemporal scales and have different velocities and magnitudes of impact, they can usually be classified as natural or human-made disasters. Natural disasters are catastrophic events caused by natural phenomena that result in serious damages to society such as flooding, volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes. Human-made disasters are destructive events triggered by human activities such as oil spills, dam collapses, or other structural failures. These disasters often contain both natural and human-made components which act over different scales.

Remote sensing has been widely utilized in different phases of disaster assessment in general, including monitoring, post-disaster analysis, prevention, and preparedness. Accurate and timely information is critical in disaster management, and the global-scale historical remote sensing archive and rapid advances in remote sensing technology have provided finer spatiotemporal resolution sensing together with increased sensitivity of sensors and efficient image processing capacities. Therefore, there is now a consensus that remote sensing technology is positioned as a critical tool in the assessment of various disasters. Some common examples may include high-temporal-resolution remote sensing employed to detect flash floods or wildfires, which usually need immediate response over large-scale areas. Some recent studies have demonstrated the applicability of InSAR in assessing the dam stability at a cm-scale to address the cause of failure.

This Special Issue on “Remote Sensing of Natural and Man-Made Disasters” is dedicated to contributing to this fast-growing current trend of remote sensing applications in the study of various types of disasters around the world. We invite studies on recent advances in the study of disasters solidly based on any types of sensors (active or passive) and platforms of remote sensing from multidisciplinary points of view, including monitoring system development, disaster management, or engineering geology, as well as review articles synthesizing the history and development of remote sensing with a focus on any types of natural or human-made disasters.

Dr. Enner Alcântara
Dr. Edward Park
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• natural disasters
• hazards
• human impacts
• environmental vulnerability