世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2), is the latest atmospheric reanalysis of the modern satellite era produced by NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO). MERRA-2 assimilates observation types not available to its predecessor, MERRA, and includes updates to the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model and analysis scheme so as to provide a viable ongoing climate analysis beyond MERRA’s terminus. While addressing known limitations of MERRA, MERRA-2 is also intended to be a development milestone for a future integrated Earth system analysis (IESA) currently under development at GMAO. This paper provides an overview of the MERRA-2 system and various performance metrics. Among the advances in MERRA-2 relevant to IESA are the assimilation of aerosol observations, several improvements to the representation of the stratosphere including ozone, and improved representations of cryospheric processes. Other improvements in the quality of M...

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The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2)

Objective. County-level socioeconomic and demographic data were used to construct an index of social vulnerability to environmental hazards, called the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) for the United States based on 1990 data.

Methods. Using a factor analytic approach, 42 variables were reduced to 11 independent factors that accounted for about 76 percent of the variance. These factors were placed in an additive model to compute a summary score—the Social Vulnerability Index.

Results. There are some distinct spatial patterns in the SoVI, with the most vulnerable counties clustered in metropolitan counties in the east, south Texas, and the Mississippi Delta region.

Conclusion. Those factors that contribute to the overall score often are different for each county, underscoring the interactive nature of social vulnerability—some components increase vulnerability; others moderate the effects.

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Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards

Impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita Le cause e le responsabilita dei cambiamenti climatici sono state trattate sul numero di ottobre della rivista Cda. Approfondiamo l’argomento presentando il documento: “Cambiamenti climatici 2007: impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita” votato ad aprile 2007 dal secondo gruppo di lavoro del Comitato Intergovernativo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Si tratta del secondo di tre documenti che compongono il quarto rapporto sui cambiamenti climatici.

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Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Remote sensing imagery needs to be converted into tangible information which can be utilised in conjunction with other data sets, often within widely used Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As long as pixel sizes remained typically coarser than, or at the best, similar in size to the objects of interest, emphasis was placed on per-pixel analysis, or even sub-pixel analysis for this conversion, but with increasing spatial resolutions alternative paths have been followed, aimed at deriving objects that are made up of several pixels. This paper gives an overview of the development of object based methods, which aim to delineate readily usable objects from imagery while at the same time combining image processing and GIS functionalities in order to utilize spectral and contextual information in an integrative way. The most common approach used for building objects is image segmentation, which dates back to the 1970s. Around the year 2000 GIS and image processing started to grow together rapidly through object based image analysis (OBIA - or GEOBIA for geospatial object based image analysis). In contrast to typical Landsat resolutions, high resolution images support several scales within their images. Through a comprehensive literature review several thousand abstracts have been screened, and more than 820 OBIA-related articles comprising 145 journal papers, 84 book chapters and nearly 600 conference papers, are analysed in detail. It becomes evident that the first years of the OBIA/GEOBIA developments were characterised by the dominance of ‘grey’ literature, but that the number of peer-reviewed journal articles has increased sharply over the last four to five years. The pixel paradigm is beginning to show cracks and the OBIA methods are making considerable progress towards a spatially explicit information extraction workflow, such as is required for spatial planning as well as for many monitoring programmes.

Object based image analysis for remote sensing

There is considerable research interest on the meaning and measurement of resilience from a variety of research perspectives including those from the hazards/disasters and global change communities. The identification of standards and metrics for measuring disaster resilience is one of the challenges faced by local, state, and federal agencies, especially in the United States. This paper provides a new framework, the disaster resilience of place (DROP) model, designed to improve comparative assessments of disaster resilience at the local or community level. A candidate set of variables for implementing the model are also presented as a first step towards its implementation.

A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters

For over 50 years, hazards researchers have focused on a series of fundamental 
questions:• What is the human occupancy of hazard zones? 
• How do people and societies respond to environmental hazards and whatfactors influence their choice of adjustments? 
• How do you mitigate the risk and impact of environmental hazards?

Vulnerability to environmental hazards

Losses from environmental hazards have escalated in the past decade, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple postevent response. There is a noticeable change in p...

Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina

There is considerable federal interest in disaster resilience as a mechanism for mitigating the impacts to local communities, yet the identification of metrics and standards for measuring resilience remain a challenge This paper provides a methodology and a set of indicators for measuring baseline characteristics of communities that foster resilience By establishing baseline conditions, it becomes possible to monitor changes in resilience over time in particular places and to compare one place to another We apply our methodology to counties within the Southeastern United States as a proof of concept The results show that spatial variations in disaster resilience exist and are especially evident in the rural/urban divide, where metropolitan areas have higher levels of resilience than rural counties However, the individual drivers of the disaster resilience (or lack thereof)-social, economic, institutional, infrastructure, and community capacities-vary widely

Susan L. Cutter

Papers

Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards

A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters

Vulnerability to environmental hazards

Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina

Disaster Resilience Indicators for Benchmarking Baseline Conditions