A New Application for Remotely Sensed Data : Construction of Building Inventories Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Technology

The MCEER research team is attempting to use Synthetic Aperature Radar (SAR) technology in combination with digital elevation models (DEM) to create building inventories for highly urbanized areas. If successful, these techniques could revolutionize the way in which structural inventory data are compiled for large cities. One particular application that is especially relevant to the MCEER program is the development of building inventory data for loss estimation modeling. Current methods of inventory development are often expensive to apply, can result in incomplete datasets, and are generally not standardized. Because of these shortcomings, these methods are employed only periodically, thus rendering the data static during its application. We intend to explore the use of airborne SAR data, along with other remotely sensed data, to construct building inventories for loss estimation modeling. In our study, we have two specific research objectives: