Awareness of the requested quantity and characteristics of emergency supplies is crucial for facilitating an efficient relief operation. With the aim of focusing on the quantitative study of immediate food supplies, this article estimates the numerical autoregressive integrative moving average (ARIMA) model based on the actual data of 14 key commodities in the Sendai City of Japan during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Although the temporal patterns of key food commodity groups are qualitatively similar, the results show that they follow different ARIMA processes, with different autoregressive moving averages and difference order patterns. A key finding is that 3 of the 14 items are significantly related to the number of temporary residents in shelters, revealing that the relatively low number of different items makes it easier to deploy these key supplies or develop regional purchase agreements so as to promptly obtain them from distributors.
Keywords: Tohoku earthquake; emergency response; food supplies; natural disaster; time series analysis.