The Use of Remotely Sensed Imagery and Gis Analysis for the Automated Detection of Water Infiltration in Residential Structures

The potential for application of GIScience techniques and technologies is increasingly being realized by a multitude of diverse domains. This paper reports on one such application in the domain of building diagnostics, a subfield of the broader economic sector of building construction. A pressing issue in building diagnostics is the detection of water infiltration, a condition that can cause significant damage to the structure of the home and the health of its inhabitants. One source of water infiltration stems from the failure of the home’s chimney pan, a flashing used externally on the chimney for the purpose of diverting rain water away from the chimney flue while allowing smoke to escape from the fireplace. The possibility of remotely detecting chimney pan failure as a proxy for water infiltration in residential structures is discussed. A model with multiple variants is offered that uses a combination of remote sensing and GIS methods to detect and extract the locations of failed chimney pans. The feasibility of implementing this model is then addressed, describing both technical and ethical impediments to successful remote monitoring of chimney pan failure. Of the variants, remote detection of chimney pan reflectance using high-resolution aerial photography in a suburban context appears to be the most promising possibility.