一、Introduction to remote sensing application in disaster prevention and reduction

China is one of the countries those suffered the most severe natural disasters in the world. The fundamental realities of the country in the area of disasters are: various types of disasters, wide spread distribution and severe losses of the disasters.All of these situations call for a combination of prevention-first and rescue, and an unification between normal and abnormal disaster reduction measures, and the shifts from emphasis on rescue to emphasis on prevention, from the reply to single disaster to the reply to complex disaster, from decreasing losses to reducing risks should be achieved, finally the whole society comprehensive prevention ability to withstand natural disasters will be improved. This is the principle of for the national disaster prevention and reduction in next few years. The principle raises a higher demand to timeliness and accuracy of the works for disaster risk prevention and loss evaluation.Remote sensing monitoring operation for disaster prevention and reduction includes five major aspects: disaster factor monitoring, disaster risk estimation, disaster emergency monitoring, disaster loss estimation and after-disaster restoration and reconstruction. The whole chain operation for disaster prevention and reduction remote sensing monitoring requires the satellite data resources the abilities in observation features extraction, batching thematic or comprehensive production, sharing services. The requirement to the remote sensing data of the disaster prevention and reduction is Multi-faceted.