Earthquake damage assessment from post-event only radar satellite data.

Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation (EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data in earthquake contexts, especially for damage assessment purposes, has been widely proposed and a number of results have been presented after every event, mostly based on optical data and manual interpretation. In this paper, the latest in a series, we instead try and focus on radar data and on making the damage assessment procedure an automated one. Using COSMO/SkyMed data, made available thanks to the cooperation of the EUCENTRE with the Italian Civil Protection Department, we are investigating the possibility to use only post-event, Very High Resolution (VHR) radar data to estimate the damage level aggregated at the size of the city block. The usefulness of considering postevent only data lies in the independence from availability of pre-event VHR data, still quite scarce given the young age of meter-resolution spaceborne SAR systems. The latest disastrous earthquake event in Haiti is currently being investigated in close cooperation with the Italian Space Agency and this paper illustrates the latest findings