Maps of soil subsidence for Tokyo bay shore areas liquefied in the March 11th, 2011 off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake

Abstract The March 11th, 2011 Off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake, also known as the Great East Japan Earthquake, has shown that a long stretch of landfills along northeastern shorelines of the Tokyo Bay had very high susceptibility to liquefaction, causing concerns about re-liquefactions of the area in the scenario earthquake expected in the capital's metropolitan area. An attempt was made to detect soil subsidence from raster images converted from airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data before and after the earthquake. To eliminate deep-seated tectonic displacements and systematic errors of LiDAR surveys, the template matching technique is used for clusters of pile-supported buildings and bridge piers chosen as templates in source images of the target areas. The obtained subsidence maps describe the spatial distribution of soil subsidence in great detail.