Rapid Assessment of Building Damage Using Multi-Source Data: A Case Study of April 2015 Nepal Earthquake

It is of great significance for emergency rescue to rapidly assess damage of buildings after an earthquake. Some previous methods are time-consuming, data are difficult to obtain, or there is lack of regional damage assessment. We proposed a novel way to rapidly assess building damage by comprehensively utilizing earth observation-derived data and field investigation to alleviate the above problems. These data are related to hazard-causing factors, hazard-formative environment, and hazard-affected body. Specifically, predicted ground motion parameters are used to reflect hazard-causing factors, e.g., peak ground velocity (PGV), peak ground acceleration (PGA), and pseudo-spectral acceleration (PSA). The hazard-formative environment is denoted by the underground 30 m shear wave velocity. Vulnerability of buildings is reflected by their structure type, age, and height. We take the April 2015 Nepal earthquake as a case study, and building damage data interpreted from satellite images are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Based on the gradient boosting machine, this paper rapidly assesses building damage from two different spatial levels, i.e., pixel and microzone, and obtains the potentially affected position and regional damage rate. Compared with the method of fragility function, the machine learning method provide a better estimation of the building damage rate. Compared with the assessment method based on remote sensing image, the method in this paper is very efficient since spatial distribution of hazard-causing factors, e.g., PGA, can be quickly predicted shortly after an earthquake. The comparison of experiment with and without vulnerability data of buildings shows that data on the vulnerability of buildings are very important to improve the assessment accuracy of building damage.

Automated summary

This study proposes a novel method to rapidly assess building damage by utilizing earth observation-derived data and field investigation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using building damage data interpreted from satellite images. The results show that the method accurately assesses building damage at different spatial levels and provides information on affected positions and regional damage rates.