GIS and Remote Sensing for Disaster Management Officers Training Course

Course overview

Disaster-management officers must make defensible decisions while roads are blocked, field reports conflict, satellite imagery is incomplete, and senior leaders need a clear operational picture. This course addresses the practical challenge of turning spatial data into situation maps, impact assessments, evacuation intelligence and recovery priorities. Participants learn to assess data reliability, combine authoritative and volunteered sources, and communicate uncertainty so that maps support incident command rather than create false confidence.

The course covers the GIS and remote-sensing workflow used across preparedness, response, damage assessment and recovery. Participants work with coordinate systems, geodatabases, mobile field data, satellite and radar imagery, elevation models, exposure layers and hazard models. They build operational dashboards and map products; perform proximity, network, overlay and change-detection analysis; estimate affected people and assets; and apply common symbology and data-sharing standards for emergency operations.

Instructor-led demonstrations are followed by hands-on work in ArcGIS Pro, QGIS and Google Earth Engine using a multi-hazard incident scenario. Teams receive simulated incident reports, imagery, infrastructure layers and population data, then produce an operational geospatial package: a situation map, impact-analysis layers, priority-area map, metadata record and briefing note for an incident-management team. The final day includes a timed emergency operations exercise and individual workplace application plan.

The programme is designed for officers who already work with emergency plans, hazard data, field assessments or incident coordination and need stronger technical control of spatial evidence. It is equally valuable to managers approving GIS-enabled response capability, because participants return with repeatable workflows, templates and quality checks that can be embedded in their agency's emergency-management procedures.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Configure a disaster-response geodatabase with defined feature classes, domains, metadata and coordinate reference systems
• Acquire and validate hazard, exposure, infrastructure and population datasets using documented source and quality checks
• Interpret optical, thermal and SAR satellite imagery for flood, wildfire, landslide and damage-assessment tasks
• Perform overlay, proximity, network and raster analysis to identify affected communities, critical assets and access constraints
• Calculate exposure estimates for population, buildings, health facilities and lifeline infrastructure within hazard zones
• Create incident situation maps using operational symbology, scale controls, map layouts and uncertainty annotations
• Publish controlled web maps and data services using role-based sharing and OGC interoperability principles
• Produce an incident geospatial briefing package containing maps, analysis outputs, metadata and decision recommendations

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Disaster Management Officers — who coordinate preparedness, response and recovery decisions using location-based evidence
• Emergency Operations Centre Analysts — who must maintain a reliable common operating picture during incidents
• Humanitarian Programme Officers — who target assessments, relief distributions and recovery support to affected areas
• Civil Defence and Emergency Response Officers — who plan evacuations, route access and resource deployment
• Public Health Emergency Officers — who assess spatial exposure, service disruption and health-facility accessibility
• Recovery and Resilience Planners — who prioritise reconstruction and risk-reduction investments by place

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable using Windows applications, managing files and spreadsheets, and reading basic maps with scale, coordinates, legends and north arrows. Prior exposure to emergency plans, incident reporting, hazard assessments or field-data collection is strongly recommended. The course assumes that participants understand common disaster terms such as hazard, exposure, vulnerability, evacuation and critical infrastructure. Previous GIS experience is helpful but not essential; the first days establish core GIS concepts before advanced analysis begins. Programming, remote-sensing science, statistics beyond basic percentages, and prior use of ArcGIS Pro, QGIS or Google Earth Engine are not required.

Training methodology

The programme combines focused instructor-led sessions with guided work in ArcGIS Pro, QGIS and Google Earth Engine. Each day uses a disaster-management task: preparing base data, interpreting imagery, mapping inundation, estimating exposure, planning access routes or producing an incident brief. Participants work individually on technical exercises and in small incident-management teams on case decisions. Instructors review map design, analytical assumptions and data-quality controls throughout. The final two days use a progressive multi-hazard simulation, ending with a team briefing and an individual plan to apply the workflow within their own agency.

Course outline

Day 1: Operational GIS foundations for emergency management

• Disaster-management information cycle and common operating picture requirements
• Vector, raster, tabular and real-time spatial data models
• Coordinate reference systems, projections and datum transformation risks
• ArcGIS Pro and QGIS interface orientation for operational mapping
• Geodatabase design for incidents, assets, shelters and field observations
• Spatial data metadata, provenance and authoritative-source assessment
• Map scale, generalisation and positional accuracy in emergency products

Workshop: Participants build an incident geodatabase and create a documented baseline map for a simulated coastal emergency.

Day 2: Data acquisition, preparation and quality control

• Authoritative hazard, census, infrastructure and administrative boundary sources
• OpenStreetMap and volunteered geographic information validation methods
• Tabular data joining, geocoding and address standardisation
• Data cleaning with attribute domains, topology rules and duplicate checks
• Field-data schema design for damage and needs assessments
• Mobile data collection workflow concepts and synchronisation controls
• Data quality scoring using completeness, timeliness, accuracy and lineage

Workshop: Participants integrate incident reports, shelter records and infrastructure data into a quality-assured operational dataset.

Day 3: Earth observation for rapid disaster assessment

• Optical satellite imagery bands, spatial resolution and revisit frequency
• Synthetic aperture radar principles for cloud-affected disaster monitoring
• Thermal imagery applications for wildfire and heat emergency analysis
• Image pre-processing, cloud masking and mosaicking concepts
• Visual interpretation cues for floodwater, burn scars and landslides
• Spectral indices including NDVI, NDWI and Normalized Burn Ratio
• Image acquisition and catalogue filtering in Google Earth Engine

Workshop: Participants compare pre- and post-event satellite scenes and produce an annotated imagery interpretation sheet.

Day 4: Hazard mapping and remote-sensing change detection

• Flood extent extraction from optical and SAR imagery
• Burn severity mapping using differenced Normalized Burn Ratio
• Landslide susceptibility inputs using slope, land cover and rainfall
• Supervised and threshold-based classification approaches
• Change-detection workflows for damaged land cover and infrastructure
• Accuracy assessment using reference samples and confusion matrices
• Uncertainty communication for remotely derived hazard boundaries

Workshop: Participants generate and validate a preliminary flood-extent layer from pre- and post-event imagery.

Day 5: Exposure and impact analysis

• Hazard-exposure-vulnerability model for impact estimation
• Spatial overlay of hazard zones with population and building layers
• Zonal statistics for raster-based exposure calculations
• Dasymetric population allocation and limitations of census geography
• Critical infrastructure dependency mapping for hospitals, utilities and schools
• Buffer and proximity analysis for secondary hazard screening
• Impact tables and assumptions registers for incident decision-makers

Workshop: Participants calculate affected population, buildings and health facilities and prepare an impact summary table.

Day 6: Evacuation, access and resource allocation analysis

• Road-network preparation and impediment coding
• Network analyst concepts for routing, service areas and closest facilities
• Evacuation catchments and shelter accessibility assessment
• Travel-time surfaces using roads, slope and land-cover friction
• Location-allocation methods for temporary relief distribution points
• Critical route prioritisation for debris clearance and logistics
• Accessibility limitations during infrastructure disruption and curfew controls

Workshop: Participants model blocked-road scenarios and produce an evacuation access map with recommended relief-point locations.

Day 7: Operational cartography and incident dashboards

• Emergency mapping symbology, colour hierarchy and visual prioritisation
• Map layouts for incident action plans and executive briefings
• Labeling, annotation and scale-dependent display rules
• Time-enabled layers and incident progression mapping
• Dashboard indicators for caseloads, service status and assessment coverage
• Chart selection and map-linked filtering for operational dashboards
• Accessibility, print production and map-reading considerations

Workshop: Participants create a command-level situation map and dashboard mock-up for a 24-hour operational briefing.

Day 8: Data sharing, interoperability and governance

• Common data models and naming conventions for multi-agency incidents
• OGC Web Map Service and Web Feature Service interoperability
• Web map publishing, permissions and role-based access controls
• Sensitive-location handling for shelters, vulnerable groups and security assets
• Data licensing for government, commercial and open geospatial datasets
• Version control, update logs and incident data custodianship
• Data retention and archiving for post-incident review

Workshop: Participants design a controlled data-sharing plan and publish a role-specific web map specification for partner agencies.

Day 9: Multi-hazard incident simulation

• Incident scenario briefing and geospatial task prioritisation
• Rapid ingestion of incoming field reports and imagery updates
• Flood, landslide and infrastructure disruption analytical workflow
• Validation of conflicting reports through spatial cross-checks
• Resource prioritisation using impact and accessibility criteria
• Situation-report map production under time constraints
• Team briefing protocols for communicating assumptions and uncertainty

Workshop: Incident teams respond to a timed multi-hazard simulation and produce a first operational common operating picture.

Day 10: Decision briefing and workplace implementation

• Refining incident maps for executive and field-user audiences
• Geospatial briefing-note structure and decision recommendation writing
• Peer review against data quality, cartographic and operational criteria
• After-action review methods for GIS-supported response operations
• Capability-gap assessment for people, data, systems and governance
• Standard operating procedure templates for geospatial incident support
• Ninety-day workplace implementation planning

Workshop: Participants submit and present their incident geospatial briefing package, then complete a 90-day implementation plan for their organisation.

Tools & standards covered

ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, Google Earth Engine, OGC Web Map Service (WMS)

A typical training day

08:30 – 10:30	First session
10:30 – 10:45	Refreshment break
10:45 – 12:30	Second session
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch and networking
13:30 – 15:00	Third session
15:00 – 15:15	Refreshment break
15:15 – 16:30	Workshop and daily review

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions