DisasterScope: A Multi-Source Multimodal Dataset and Benchmark for Disaster Response and Severity Assessment

Abstract

Disaster response often requires evidence from several sources, including satellite imagery, social media, news reports, audio and video recordings, and event metadata. Existing disaster datasets, however, usually focus on one source, a limited set of modalities or a single task. This separation makes it difficult to evaluate models that must combine regional observations with ground-level evidence for the same disaster context. We introduce DisasterScope, an event-centric multimodal dataset and benchmark for disaster-type recognition, severity assessment and evidence retrieval. DisasterScope organizes satellite observations, social images, synchronized audio–video segments, observation text, report passages, and provenance metadata around canonical events. Its primary benchmark contains 12,159 fixed event-context bundles from 24 events and nine disaster classes. The dynamic-media inventory includes 273 source videos, 628 curated audio–video segments, 9.02 h of material and 5473 temporal windows. Labels are harmonized through source-label inheritance, taxonomy mapping, teacher assistance and partition-specific human review. Validation and test annotations were reviewed in full, while training annotations were sampled for review and accepted through a threshold gate. The benchmark evaluates full-input and unavailable-view conditions on the same bundle identities, allowing direct measurement of how each view affects a model without changing the evaluated sample population. DisasterScope therefore provides a traceable setting for studying multimodal disaster assessment across different disasters, evidence sources and input-availability conditions.