Remote Sensing for Disaster Management

Foundations, wide-area assessment & mission design

1. 08:30–09:00Registration and tea · badge collection, laptop check, Earth Engine login verification
2. 09:00–09:20Opening ceremony

   Welcome address, workshop inauguration, and statement of course objectives.

3. 09:20–10:10Module 1 · Foundations of remote sensing across scales

   Passive versus active sensing. The resolution quartet (spatial, spectral, temporal, radiometric) and why all four cannot be maximized at once. The swath-versus-resolution trade-off. What “large-scale” changes: data volume, radiometric consistency, cloud cover and processing throughput. The continuum from satellite constellations to manned aerial surveys, UAVs and ground surveys, and the reporting scale each supports. Where Earth observation enters each phase of the disaster management cycle.

4. 10:10–10:55Module 2 · Data access and international emergency mapping

   Sentinel-1, -2 and -3; Landsat 8 and 9; MODIS and VIIRS; GPM IMERG; Copernicus and NASADEM elevation models; when commercial very-high-resolution tasking is justified. Revisit arithmetic under monsoon cloud. Analysis-Ready Data and the workload it removes. Live walkthrough of the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem and the Google Earth Engine catalogue. The International Charter “Space and Major Disasters”, Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping, Sentinel Asia and UN-SPIDER, with emphasis on how a Pakistani agency requests activation and realistic delivery timelines.

5. 10:55–11:10Tea break
6. 11:10–12:00Module 3 · UAV systems, regulation and payloads

   Definition, development and characteristics of UAVs. System composition: airframe, propulsion, flight controller, GNSS and IMU, datalink, ground control station and payload. Fixed-wing, multirotor and hybrid VTOL configurations, and platform selection by flight time, altitude, speed, payload capacity and integration. Imaging principles of optical, multispectral, thermal and LiDAR payloads. Regulations and responsible authorities in Pakistan; procedures for permission, notification, restricted airspace and flight logging. UAVs across the disaster cycle compared with traditional survey and satellite observation.

7. 12:00–13:30Lunch and prayers
8. 13:30–14:00Lab 0 · Environment check

   Orientation to the Earth Engine Code Editor, the shared script repository, running a first script and troubleshooting logins. An offline data package for anyone whose access has failed.

9. 14:00–15:30Lab 1A · Rapid flood mapping from Sentinel-1 SAR

   Why SAR for floods: cloud penetration and the specular reflection of open water. Pre- and post-event Sentinel-1 GRD imagery in VV polarization; speckle filtering; change-detection ratio and histogram thresholding; terrain masking with slope and Height Above Nearest Drainage to suppress radar-shadow false positives. Output: a flood extent layer for the August–September 2022 Sindh floods.

10. 15:30–15:45Tea break
11. 15:45–16:20Lab 1B · Exposure and impact quantification

    Intersecting flood extent with WorldPop population, ESA WorldCover cropland and OpenStreetMap roads and settlements to build a district-wise exposure table. Error sources (permanent water, under-detected urban flooding, vegetated floodplain) and identifying the sub-areas where those limits justify an aerial survey.

12. 16:20–17:00Lab 2 · Flight planning and mission design

    Formulating a survey flight plan: area, sensor, forward and side overlap, ground sample distance, efficiency, accuracy and safety. Delineating the flight area around prohibited and restricted zones; setting altitude and speed against sensor, terrain and overlap; automatic route generation and manual adjustment. Each group plans the mission it will fly on Day 2 for instructor review. Field safety and pre-flight briefing issued.

Field operations & UAV data processing

1. 08:30–09:00Transfer and pre-flight briefing

   Transfer to the NUST field site. Airspace and site status, weather and wind limits, emergency procedures, lost-link and return-to-home behaviour, crew roles and the go/no-go decision. Aircraft and battery checks, compass and IMU calibration, ground control point layout.

2. 09:00–11:30Field practical · UAV flight operations

   Groups rotate through supervised stations: basic manual handling; emergency take-off and landing, including over uneven terrain; one-click return-to-home configuration; execution of the planned mission. Multi-source acquisition of a nadir orthophoto block, an oblique block and thermal infrared coverage of the same area, plus a ground control point survey.

3. 11:30–12:00Data offload and quality check

   On-site verification of coverage, overlap and image quality; completing the flight log; transferring imagery to the processing workstations.

4. 12:00–13:30Lunch and prayers · return to IGIS
5. 13:30–15:15Lab 3A · Photogrammetric processing

   UAV data products and the processing chain: POS data organization; image pre-processing and quality screening; rapid stitching for first-look products; alignment, registration and correction; dense reconstruction; DSM and orthomosaic generation; georeferencing to ground control and accuracy reporting; export. A rapid field product compared with a fully processed one, and the time cost of each.

6. 15:15–15:30Tea break
7. 15:30–17:00Lab 3B · 3D modelling and damage quantification

   Oblique photogrammetry from acquisition through checking, import, adjustment, modelling and output. Change detection between epochs for rapid loss assessment; landslide displacement from differenced surface models; building damage classes and damaged road length. Reconciling these figures with the satellite exposure table from Lab 1.

If weather or airspace prevents flying, a pre-flown reference dataset is staged in advance so the processing labs run as planned.

Integration, case studies & rapid-response simulation

1. 09:00–09:35Module 4 · Integrating the observation chain

   Designing a nested assessment: satellite screening to bound the event, coarse exposure estimation to prioritize, UAV tasking of priority sub-areas, and ground validation. Where the handovers sit in time, who authorizes each, and the realistic latency of each stage. UAV surveys as reference data for validating satellite classifications, and the sampling design that makes this valid. Propagating uncertainty, and reporting a figure that will be challenged in a compensation process.

2. 09:35–10:15Applied case studies

   • Flood risk assessment of Attabad Lake using a scenario-based approach for disaster preparedness.
   • Scenario-based HEC-RAS 2D unsteady flow analysis of Shisper Lake for GLOF risk assessment.
   • Riverine flood assessment in Jhang district in relation to ENSO and summer monsoon rainfall over the Upper Indus Basin.
3. 10:15–10:30Tea break · scenario cards and data packages distributed
4. 10:30–11:45Capstone · Rapid-response simulation

   Six groups of five each have 45 minutes to build a four-slide rapid assessment brief: a satellite-derived event footprint, an exposure table, a UAV tasking plan with priority areas, flight time and crew estimate, and a confidence statement with recommended next tasking. Four minutes per group to present. Scenarios: monsoon flooding in Dera Ghazi Khan, a GLOF in Hunza, an earthquake near Muzaffarabad, multi-season drought in Tharparkar, urban flooding in Karachi, and post-flood reconstruction tracking in Sindh.

5. 11:45–12:15Communication, summary and closing

   Data sharing and interoperability: Pak-NSDI, inter-agency arrangements, custody of UAV imagery and remaining gaps. Self-study packages and the follow-up online clinic. Feedback, course summary, remarks by dignitaries, certificates and group photograph.