Potential Of Satellite Remote Sensing To Monitor Vulnerablity Of Buildings To Earthquakes Within A Semi-Empirical Macroseismic Approach

An essential step in earthquake risk assessment consists in collecting information regarding buildings at risks in order to evaluate their vulnerability, and, ultimately, their expected damages for events of specific intensity. A number of building features can be retrieved by means of remote sensing, either directly (through direct observations of features such as their size or footprints) or indirectly (by appraising the expected building types, given features such as the shape of roads or roofs, and an a-priori knowledge of the urban landscape of interest). Here, we evaluate to which extent the accuracy of mean damage grade can be improved by means of remote sensing using the RISK-EU (2004) [1] assessment grid. The results show that if nothing is known regarding the building stocks in the city of interest, the uncertainty in average vulnerability can be reduced by half using remote sensing observations if adequate indirect proxies can be found.