Ray Kameda
Assignment 7

Briefly describe your project goals (can be copied and pasted from your last assignment if it hasn't changed)
For my final GIS project, I would like to investigate the damage from the Japan Earthquake that
occurred on March 11, 2011 and the effectiveness of relief efforts that immediately followed it.
Initially wanted to investigate how well the Japan Crisis Map,(http://www.sinsai.info/ushahidi/)
represented the tsunami damaged areas of most need, but I think I will now focus more on creating a
tsunami vulnerability analysis based on topographical features and see if it properly represents the
actual damage and casualties caused by the tsunami.
Depending on how much time I have left, I would like to do a preliminary investigation of the
correlation of the spatial distribution of twittered requests with areas of most need. Although the
Japanese data attributes did not transfer well into ArcGIS, I still can tell the spatial location of the
points and I might do a “heat” or density map of the data to see if there is any correlation with tsunami
damage maps, casualties, and the blackouts after the earthquake.

Complete the additional requirements below depending on your project - in general we want to see your GIS data
layers (in a table is best), the steps you intend to take (can be in a flow chart or in a numbered list), and your
expected final product in terms of maps, tables. etc.
Base Layers
Earthquake/tsuna
mi data
Data Layers

Japan
Political
Boundaries

Elevation
Raster Data

Coastal Line

Water
bodies

Roads

Damage
vector data

Tsunami
time contour
data

Flooding
Vector data

Shelter data
points
Source
National-Land Numerical Information
http://nlftp.mlit.go.jp/ksj/jpgis/jpgis_datalist.html
Pacific Disaster Center
http://ags.pdc.org/rest/services/Japan/Japan_EQ_Response/MapServ
er
Harvard Sendai Earthquake Data Portal Site
http://cegrp.cga.harvard.edu/japan/?q=resources_data

Miyagi
Casualties
data
Generously received from NYTIMES Matthew Bloch
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/newsgraphics/2011/0311japan-earthquake-map/

Damaged
Road Status
Toyota Traffic results information
http://traffic.premium-club.jp/earthquake/sanriku/
If I can’t get data from immediately after the earthquake, I might not
use this

Japan
Ushahidi
Crisis Map
Reports
March 10-12
Geocommons
http://geocommons.com/overlays/100145

Night lights
Black out
data
NASA Power Outages after earthquake
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/data/web_data/japan/12MARCH2011.
html
Steps:
I think I first will try to determine what the most tsunami affected areas were from various sources of data, maybe an
elementary tsunami vulnerability analysis, based on topographic features, like slope, elevation, distance from
shoreline, topographic relation to tsunami direction, all weighted based on other vulnerability assessments like from
Sinaga, et. al., 2011.
Data Processing
This will be a very time consuming process because of the format of the data is in XML from the
Japanese website and I will spend a lot of time trying to geocode these datasets, which im still
trying to figure out. I was able to do it fairly easy with vector data, but I will need help with the
elevation raster sets.
(Hopefully the attributes for all my data layers won’t be gibberish)
Because of this I might either do only the Tsunami Vulnerability Analysis or if I can’t get the
data to work, just do a spatial analysis of the Crisis Map Twitter reports with existing tsunami
damage assessment vector data, and the power outage data.
Tsunami “Vulnerability Analysis”
=> Elevation
=>Low to High 1-5
Elevation
= > Aspect
=> Tsunami Direction
Vulnerability
Elevation
Coastal Line
=> Slope
=> Distance
=> Slope Vulnerability
=> Coastal Proximity
Elevation
Tsunami Vulnerability
I will then compare my tsunami vulnerability analysis to the Pacific Disaster Center Tsunami Damage Vector data and
analyze the proportion of area that overlaps with an Intersect overlay over the area that doesn’t intersect.
I will also do a Spatial join with Casualties data to see how many casualties were in different vulnerability zones.
This investigation will see if a simple topographical tsunami vulnerability analysis can accurately predict the
vulnerable areas.
Crisis Map Data Analysis reports from the Japan Crisis map data (www.sinsai.info).
I will do a spatial Join to the Pacific Disaster Center Tsunami Damage Vector data. And see how many reports were
within, and outside. The twitter data will only be from the first 2 days so it might indicate how effective the system was
immediately after the quake.
I will make a new vector from only the RED “blackout” parts of the raster power outage data layer. Then I will do a
spatial join to see how many twitters in the Red zone.