G-DIF: A geospatial data integration framework to rapidly estimate post-earthquake damage
Citation
Loos, S., Lallemant, D., Baker, J., McCaughey, J., Yun, S.H., Budhathoki, N., Khan, F., Singh, R. (2020). G-DIF: A geospatial data integration framework to rapidly estimate post-earthquake damage. Earthquake Spectra, 36(4): 2347-2365. Link to paper
Abstract
While unprecedented amounts of building damage data are now produced after earthquakes, stakeholders do not have a systematic method to synthesize and evaluate damage information, thus leaving many datasets unused. We propose a Geospatial Data Integration Framework (G-DIF) that employs regression kriging to combine a sparse sample of accurate field surveys with spatially exhaustive, though uncertain, damage data from forecasts or remote sensing. The framework can be implemented after an earthquake to produce a spatially distributed estimate of damage and, importantly, its uncertainty. An example application with real data collected after the 2015 Nepal earthquake illustrates how regression kriging can combine a diversity of datasets—and downweight uninformative sources—reflecting its ability to accommodate context-specific variations in data type and quality. Through a sensitivity analysis on the number of field surveys, we demonstrate that with only a few surveys, this method can provide more accurate results than a standard engineering forecast.