The Syrian/Turkey earthquake is a humanitarian crisis that left tens of thousands dead and countless others in need of rescue efforts. Emergency response centers have been created in large open areas like the Kahramanmaraş Football Stadium. Damage assessments made using high resolution satellite images help generate maps that navigate rescuers. The maps will help the rescuers orient themselves through the rubbled roads and access remote areas in need of help.
What Worked: The assessment of the earthquake was made possible through three main methods. The Landsat 8 imagery that was viewed on visible, which had a fair amount of change detected of the before and after images. The before and after night light change images was another successful method that resulted in a clear change in night pollution. The most successful method that was used to access infrastructure damage was using high resolution data obtained from Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies and Google Earth Pro.
What Did Not Work: There were also several limitations. Even though some change was viewed in the Landsat 8 imagery, the 30 meter data was too large and resulted in a poor quality image. The civil war conflict made it difficult to differentiate infrastructure damage resulting from the war or from the earthquake. We tried using the most recent imagery possible, but that could have been an affecting variable in our project. Additionally, the night light change did not contain any usable tabular data.
How Our Research Compares to Others: NASA made an assessment of the infrastructure damage in several regions affected by the Syria/Turkey earthquake. They used (SAR) Synthetic Aperture Radar which is a technique that bounces microwave pulses off the Earth`s surface to decode the physical properties. Data from images of before and after are used. The assessment ranges from yellow to red. Yellow represent areas that are likely partially damaged and red to represent areas that are likely severely damaged. This approach is more extensive as it displays minor damage not clearly seen on satellite imagery.
Future Avenues of Research: The earthquake was fairly recent which means there is limited information available. Data that can be used to make a more in depth analysis includes higher resolution imagery and a panchromatic band in the Landsat 8 imagery. The goal is to have more data accessible to make a better assessment of the earthquake which will hopefully lead to an effective distribution of resources to areas affected by the earthquake.