Since 2000, there have been a number of spaceborne satellites that have changed the way we assess and predict natural hazards. These satellites are able to quantify physical geographic phenomena associated with the movements of the earth's surface (earthquakes, mass movements), water (floods, tsunamis, storms), and fire (wildfires). Most of these satellites contain active or passive sensors tha...

The Xiaojiaqiao barrier lake, which was the second largest barrier lake formed by the Wenchuan Earthquake had seriously threatened the lives and property of the population downstream. The lake was finally dredged successfully on 7 June 2008. Because of the limited time available to conduct an inundation potential analysis and make an evacuation plan, barrier lake information extraction and real...

When stricken by a catastrophic natural disaster, the efficiency of disaster response operation is very critical to life saving. However, communication systems, including cellular networks, were usually crashed due to various causes making the coordination among a large number of disorganized disaster response workers extremely difficult. Unfortunately, rapid deployment of an emergency communic...

Advances in multimedia and ad-hoc networking have urged a wealth of research in multimedia delivery over ad-hoc networks. This comes as no surprise, as those networks are versatile and beneficial to a plethora of applications where the use of fully wired network has proved intricate if not impossible, such as prompt formation of networks during conferences, disaster relief in case of flood and ...

The term "natural disaster" is used to refer to catastrophes that arise from acts of nature such as flood, wind, drought and earthquake. However, many people have challenged this terminology as misleading. As long ago as 1976,1 Frederick Krimgold defined a disaster as an event that outstrips the capacity of a society to cope with it. This definition highlights the fact that not every natural cr...

Earthquake, flood, and drought data from different sources are combined in a single data set using the same data structure, projection, and scale. The intensity and frequency of each hazard is classified into severe, heavy, modest, and light, producing a dassification with 64 combined states for the three kinds of hazard. These classes are then ranked according to severity. The three hazard cov...

In wireless ad hoc network applications, such as outdoor teaching, battlefield, scenes of a fire, flood, and earthquake a number of mobile hosts (MHs) may sometimes move together and sometimes separately. Members within the group have similar mobility patterns and can directly communicate with each other. In this paper, we propose an Autonomic Group Mobility (AGM) model for Mobile Ad hoc NETtwo...

When a natural or human-caused disaster, such as flood earthquake or explosion, strikes urban search and rescue (USAR) teams are deployed to the affected area in order to locate; excavate; and treat survivors trapped in the ruins. The deployment of an USAR team to an affected area is called a search and rescue (SAR) mission. During an SAR mission the team members have to work together in extrem...

In the European multi-centre study BeSeCu, interviews in seven countries were conducted in order to explore emotional, behavioural and cognitive responses during disasters as experienced by survivors. Interviews (either in groups or one-to-one) were run by type of event: terror attack, fire, collapse of a building, earthquake and flood. While the environmental cues and ability to recognise what...

We consider an optimal control problem of a property insurance company with proportional reinsurance strategy. The insurance business brings in catastrophe risk, such as earthquake and flood. The catastrophe risk could be partly reduced by reinsurance. The management of the company controls the reinsurance rate and dividend payments process to maximize the expected present value of the dividend...