Winter 2005

MapRelief Experts provide high-tech mapping software to help with tsunami recovery. PDF format by Jane M. Sanders

SENDING MONEY TO help southeast Asia’s tsunami-stricken region wasn’t enough for a Georgia Tech Research Institute scientist and his colleague. They decided to send themselves – paying with their own funds – to lend their high-tech mapping expertise to recovery and rebuilding efforts.

courtesy International Center for Remote Sensing Education Georgia Tech researcher Nick Faust observes damage along the Thai peninsula in early January. He and colleague Tim Foresman collaborated with researchers at the Asian Institute of Technology to create detailed maps of the tsunami-stricken area. (300-dpi JPEG version - 644K)

Their volunteer mission began in early January 2005 with providing advanced geographic information system (GIS) mapping capability to aid agencies and other officials working in the region, which was devastated by a Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people. GIS combines layers of information, such as terrain and vegetation data, for comprehensive analysis of a particular area.

“We decided we should go sooner rather than later,” says Nick Faust, a semi-retired principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “…. We saw the news reports, the accounts of all the deaths – one-third of them children. We wanted to do something, and we had the contacts and the expertise.”

Faust and Tim Foresman, president of the non-profit International Center for Remote Sensing Education (ICRSE), of which Faust is vice-president, installed advanced image processing and GIS software for their colleagues at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok, Thailand. Their mission was part of ICRSE’s “MapRelief” effort to provide quick mapping capabilities to places in need. For the Thailand visit, the researchers cooperated with both the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the U.S. State Department.

© Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing & Processing, National University of Singapore Before-and-after images show the devastation (note the increase in greenish area in the bottom image) from the tsunami along the Thai coast in Phuket. (300-dpi JPEG version - 320K) (300-dpi JPEG version - 257K)

“When we got there, we found what we expected,” Faust says. “A lot of the aid agencies were having to send people out in the field with no maps…. The U.N. has GIS mapping capabilities on a global scale, but what they needed were maps on a local scale because the tsunami damage only extended from the coast to a few miles inland.”

Commercial satellite imagery companies provided the needed imagery, but AIT researchers needed advanced technology to incorporate it into a GIS system. So Faust installed the ERDAS Imagine software, which was donated to the cause by Leica-Geosystems, a Swiss company. (Faust was one of the founders of ERDAS, an Atlanta-based Georgia Tech spin-off company that developed image processing and GIS software as a commercial product. Leica-Geosystems bought ERDAS, a graduate of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center incubator, in 2001.)

“GIS maps will be able to help with cleanup and rebuilding as officials try to determine higher areas were people can build,” Faust explains. “It may be that people will not be allowed to rebuild in certain areas because of the flooding risk.” Accurate mapping, along with a tsunami warning network similar to those in Japan and the central Pacific, will help save lives in case of another tsunami, he adds.

With the software upgrade, AIT will be able to use its conference facilities to host training sessions in GIS and global positioning system technology for AIT graduates – many of whom work for aid agencies throughout southeast Asia – and others.

During the trip, Faust and Foresman also saw the impact of the tsunami first hand in the Phuket and Phi Phi islands regions of Thailand. That devastation – much of which had already been bulldozed – only motivated them more to become involved in the long term with their AIT colleagues, Asian aid agencies and disaster preparedness groups, Faust says.

In the coming months, Faust and Foresman – under the auspices of ICRSE – hope to obtain government or private foundation grants to fund additional collaboration with AIT to assist in relocation plans for tsunami victims and develop a long-term regional planning response to the disaster. The researchers hope to recruit some of their GIS colleagues around the world as volunteers in the effort and to coordinate their participation with other professional volunteer groups.

“This sort of effort fits well with the international outreach that Georgia Tech and GTRI people are already doing in such places as Rwanda, Congo, Angola, China and the Galapagos Islands,” Faust says. “We need to do even more because we live in a global community.”

Read more at: www.maprelief.org

For more information, contact Nick Faust at 404-894-0021 or nick.faust@gtri.gatech.edu   - or Tim Foresman at 410-796-1980 or foresman@direcway.com.

Contents    Research Horizons    GT Research News    GTRI    Georgia Tech

Send questions and comments regarding these pages to webadmin@edi.gatech.edu
Last updated: April 3, 2005