Post-event Spaceborne VHR Radar for Seismic Damage Assessment: Integrating Pre-event Optical Data?

Previous work from the authors’ research group has highlighted a link between the level of seismic damage in urban areas, expressed in terms of area rate covered by the damaged buildings within each block, and some numerical indexes derived from texture maps extracted from postevent VHR radar images. The link is unfortunately somehow weak, though visible, and its operational exploitation requires a more reliable connection to be established between texture values and damage level. To do this, one possible approach is that of sorting out the blocks whose behaviour is farther from the “perfect” index-damage correlation and investigating the causes for the mismatch to set a base for corrective measures. This paper illustrates some early findings in such investigation in progress on the 2010 Haiti case as observed in 1-m COSMO/SkyMed spotlight images