Abstract

The application of GIS in natural disaster management has become a vital technological approach. In Australia, floods and bushfires are the foremost natural disasters, causing significant damage each year. Between 1967 and 2013, Australia suffered an annual economic loss of A$943 million due to flood occurrences. Regarding bushfire disasters, the Australian Bureau of Criminology reported that bushfire damage totalled about $2.5 billion from 1967 to 1999, excluding losses to forest cover. After the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, which killed 173 people, the public and authorities paid significant attention to bushfires. The massive losses from these natural disasters prompted scientists to explore new methods to mitigate their impacts. The application of freely available real-time satellite imagery, including NASA’s MODIS data and ESA’s Sentinel data, can be used in GIS-based image processing, the method discussed in this paper, as a new approach to support disaster mitigation. This approach delivers GIS content on the Google Earth platform via social media, preferably using apps. Since mobile phones are the most accessible devices today, social media content can be delivered efficiently to affected people. A case study is presented in this paper, using the free academic app (seesatview) produced by the main author.

Keywords:GIS; Himawari; MODIS; Google Earth; Social Media