THE ROLE OF SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING TO DETECT AND ASSESS THE DAMAGE OF TSUNAMI DISASTER

The tsunami from the megathrust earthquake magnitude 9.3 on 26 December 2004 is the largest tsunami the world has known in over forty years. This tsunami destructively attacked 13 countries around Indian Ocean with at least 230,000 fatalities, displaced people 2,089,883 and 1.5 million people who lost their livelihoods. The ratio of women and children killed to men is 3 to 1. The total damage costs US$ 10.73 billion and rebuilding costs US$ 10.375 billion. The tsunami's death toll could have been drastically reduced, if the warning was disseminated quickly and effectively to the coastal dwellers along the Indian Ocean rim. With a warning system in Indian Ocean similar to that operating in the Pacific Ocean since 1965, it would have been possible to warn, evacuate and save countless lives. The best tribute we can pay to all who perished or suffered in this disaster is to heed its powerful lessons. UNESCO/IOC have put their tremendous effort on better disaster preparedness, functional early warning systems and realistic arrangements to cope with tsunami disaster. They organized ICG/IOTWS (Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System) and the third of this meeting is held in Bali, Indonesia during $31^{st}$ July to $4^{th}$ August 2006. A US$ 53 million interim warning system using tidal gauges and undersea sensors is nearing completion in the Indian Ocean with the assistance from IOC. The tsunami warning depends strictly on an early detection of a tsunami (wave) perturbation in the ocean itself. It does not and cannot depend on seismological information alone. In the case of 26 December 2004 tsunami when the NOAA/PMEL DART (Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami) system has not been deployed, the initialized input of sea surface perturbation for the MOST (Method Of Splitting Tsunami) model was from the tsunamigenic-earthquake source model. It is the first time that the satellite altimeters can detect the signal of tsunami wave in the Bay of Bengal and was used to validate the output from the MOST model in the deep ocean. In the case of Thailand, the inundation part of the MOST model was run from Sumatra 2004 for inundation mapping purposes. The medium and high resolution satellite data were used to assess the degree of the damage from Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 with NDVI classification at 6 provinces on the Andaman seacoast of Thailand. With the tide-gauge station data, run-up surveys, bathymetry and coastal topography data and land-use classification from satellite imageries, we can use these information for coastal zone management on evacuation plan and construction code.