Exploring the Spatial Association between Measures from Satellite Imagery and Patterns of Urban Vulnerability to Earthquake Hazards

This paper discusses the implementation of an integrated set of methods used to explore the relative importance of the social characteristics and the physical conditions of urban morphology in shaping the spatial patterns of urban vulnerability to earthquake hazards in Los Angeles County. These methods include: (1) the development of an index for social vulnerability at the census tract level based on the 1990 population census, (2) the normalization of remotely sensed measures that describe the composition of census tracts in terms of the fractional abundance of urban land cover extracted through the spectral mixture analysis of a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image, (3) the utilization of landscape pattern metrics for deriving new variables that describe the urban spatial structure of census tracts based on urban land cover fractions, and (4) the use of a spatial filtering technique to resolve the spatial autocorrelation problem among the independent variables. The paper begins with an introduction about urban vulnerability, highlighting the results of previous investigations conducted by the present authors, followed by an outline of the methods utilized in the present study. The remaining sections of the paper introduce the statistical models in which the remotely sensed variables are employed, demonstrate the results of such models, and discuss the conclusions that can be drawn from these results.