Shelling And Damages Proxies
EO Capability Benefits
Thermal anomalies and heatmaps of changes provide critical insights into detecting and assessing damage from shelling and military actions by capturing physical and environmental changes invisible to the naked eye. In post-disaster and post-conflict settings, this enables the rapid prioritization of emergency response and restoration efforts. Finally, wildfire monitoring has recently been revolutionized through satellite-based observations of thermal anomalies offering near-real time early warning capabilities to authorities.
EO Capability Description
Tools like thermal infrared (TIR) sensors, short wave infrared (SWIR) and near infrared (NIR) imaging, and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are leveraged to identify burning areas, damage to crops and structural degradation of infrastructure and buildings.
Satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) combined with deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can assess damage severity at regional and asset scales. An advantage here is the ability to validate damage using open-source imagery and crowdsourced data.
Shelling-induced fires generate distinct thermal anomalies detectable via multispectral or hyperspectral sensors. For asset-level (e.g. building level) assessments of thermal anomalies, the relatively coarse spatial resolution of free and open thermal infrared data, for instance from MODIS or Landsat, may miss small-scale signals, necessitating drone-based thermal imaging. However, recent and upcoming private sector deployments of satellite-borne Very High Resolution thermal infrared sensors are opening up these use cases in post-disaster and post-conflict settings.
Larger burning areas present high reflectance in the SWIR and NIR band which allows for fire monitoring and detection of thermal anomalies in human settlements and non-built up areas using free and open High Resolution (HR) optical imagery, for instance from Sentinel-2.