Damage Assessment in Post-Event VHR Radar Images: a Preliminary Study on COSMO/SkyMed Data from 2009 Italy Earthquake

EO-based earthquake damage assessment is a valuable tool to support management of the post-earthquake phase. Most methods available so far either rely on visual interpretation or pre-post-event comparison. Pre-event data may not be available when Very High Resolution spaceborne data is used. In this paper we present some basic facts that may eventually lead to a damage assessment method requiring only post-event data