Natural Disaster Mapping

New innovations in natural disaster mapping are starting to come to fruition.  Natural disasters such as landslides and earthquakes can quickly alter landscapes, which presents logistical problems for first responders and utility crews.  But this may soon change thanks to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) initiative that seeks to develop a way to produce and analyze satellite imagery of an impacted area, in order to quickly produce maps to inform emergency and restoration crews.

The Benefits of Natural Disaster Mapping

If you are reading this, you likely know that crews are typically sent to assess damage.  This goes for utility crews as well as the USGS personnel that are typically deployed after a disaster.  This physical deployment approach which can be a time consuming damage assessment process, mainly due to the time it takes to travel to the site, collect the data, and complete the analysis.

Conversely, the USGS initiative, which is specifically focused on post-landslide mapping, aims to build an algorithm that can analyze drone and satellite imagery to generate new maps within minutes.  This will dramatically accelerate the restoration and recovery process, and save lives to boot.

That said, as the article points out, imagery analysis technology is not perfect.  For example, the imaging technology could become obstructed on cloudy days, and sometimes the technology has difficulty discerning between similar shades of color.  But as the technology evolves, this will change for the better.  Either way, this new approach is clearly better than the risky and time-consuming approach of manual natural disaster mapping.