Recovery monitoring of tsunami damaged paddy fields using MODIS NDVI

Abstract

On March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake struck Tohoku Region of Japan. Huge area in the northeast coast of Japan was seriously damages by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Since then, the authors have been monitoring the recovery of the tsunami damaged areas of the Miyagi Prefecture by ground survey and satellite image data analysis. In this study, the authors have investgated how the NDVI seasonal variability of inundated puddy fields change from year to year after the tsunami. The authors have selected some test site of normal puddy fields, inundated inshore paddy fields, and inundated inland paddy fields. Usually, the NDVI of typical paddy field gradually increase from May to August and suddenly decreases in September due to harvesting. As for the year 2011, the NDVI of the paddy fields damaged by the tsunami in March did not increase much even in the summer time. However, in inland paddy fields which were suffered by the Tsunami, the NDVI variability became almost the same as that of normal paddy field in 2012. This means, that those inland paddy fields were recovered within one year. On the other hand, the inundated inshore paddy fields did not show such clear recovery.