Creation of a Remote Sensing Portal for Practical Use Dedicated to Local Goverments in Kyushu, Japan

Remote sensing portal site for practical uses which is dedicated to local governments is created. Key components of the site are (1) links to data providers, (2) links to the data analysis software tools, (3) examples of actual uses of the satellite remote sensing data in particular for local governments. Users’ demands for remote sensing satellite data are investigated for the local governments situated in Kyushu, Japan. According to the users’ demands, the remote sensing portal site is created with the aforementioned key components. For the examples of remote sensing data applications, creation of land use maps, disaster mitigations, forest maps, vegetation index map for evaluation of vitality of agricultural fields and forests, etc. are taken into account. In particular for forest map creation, it is created with free open source software: FOSS of classifiers together with open data API derived training samples applied to Landsat-8 OLI data. On the other hand, volcanic eruption is featured for disaster relief with 3D representation by using open data derived DEM data. In accordance with the users’ evaluation reports, it is found that the proposed portal site is useful. Keywords—Remote Sensing; Satellite data; Land use map creation; Disaster prevention; Normalized Difference Vegetation Index: NDVI; Forest map; Volacanic eruption; 3D representation with Digital Elevation Model: DEM; Open data API