Abstract:
Natural disaster mitigation is a collective effort of forecast, assessment, and encouraging the public
participation in disaster mitigation. This study focused on the rarely addressed aspect, “the value of public
awareness” in natural disaster mitigation. The methodology used satellite data and Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) to produce semi-real-time “Media GIS” contents. When deliver the content to the media with
maximizing four related factors; speed, attractiveness, richness, and accuracy, Media GIS contents will help
to increase the public awareness on the respective disaster. The methodology to produce Media GIS contents
is based on; basic fundamentals of GIS, freely available satellite images, and information extracted from
Google Earth. Hence, contents carry inherent characters of GIS and significantly different from conventional
graphics in media. Also the graphical variables like, size, value, texture, hue, orientation, and shape, were
optimized to match with target content users (age group, social group) and medium (print, TV, WEB,
mobile), while minimizing the cost. With the news brakes of the disaster, MODIS (250m) satellite data can be
extracted in Geo TIFF and KLM (Keyhole Markup Language) formats. The KML file can be overlayed on
Google Earth, to extract more spatial information of the area of interest. Photoshop or any similar graphic
software can be used to create the product while keeping the geometric character of the content. The final
output (in TIFF/JPEG and KLM file) is the GIS media content for TV, WEB, mobile contents, and for print
media, which support to increase the public awareness of the disaster. Two cases studies; disastrous flood
occurred in Bangkok in 2011 and the severe drought recorded in eastern Sri Lanka in 2014, are presented in
the study.
