Severe geo-physical or climatic events, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, droughts, floods, cyclones and fire that threaten people or property, are termed natural hazards.

Remote sensing — the science of acquiring information about the Earth using remote instruments, is inherently useful for disaster management.When a disaster strikes, Remote sensing is often the only way to view what is happening on the ground.

Earthquake response

At present, earthquakes are hard to predict. But Remote sensing could improve forecasts using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). This technique combines two or more sequential radar images to measure ground motion between them very accurately — on the scale of a few centimetres (or even millimetres). InSAR instruments, such as PALSAR, are already routinely used after earthquakes to assess damage and the extent of ground movement and deformation.