Satellite-based damage assessment of rice growing areas after the 2011 Tsunami in Japan

The occurrence of earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011 in Japan's Pacific coast caused damaged infrastructure and rice growing areas. This study aimed to assess the rice growing areas damaged due to this catastrophic event using the 2011 MODIS data. The methods used to process the data comprised three main steps: (1) data preprocessing to create the filtered time-series enhanced vegetation index 2 (EVI2) data, (2) rice crop mapping using the dynamic time warping (DTW) method, (3) accuracy assessment of the mapping results. The mapping results validated using the ground reference data indicated an overall accuracy of 84.3% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.69, respectively. The results were also compared with the government's rice area statistics, indicating a close correlation between the two datasets (R² = 0.86). This study demonstrates the applicability of MODIS 250 m data and DTW for rice damage assessment in the study region.