Remote Sensing and Recovery: A Case Study on the Gulf Coast of the United States

Little is currently known about the potential role of satellite imagery for monitoring and assessing the recovery phase of the disaster management cycle. The impacts and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provide a unique opportunity to explore recovery at a time when commercial high-resolution remote sensing platforms offer an optimal resolution for such studies. The spatial, spectral and temporal signatures of the recovery process are currently being explored based on field and imagery based observations along the Gulf of Mexico Coastline of the United States.
The work seeks to document and describe characteristics of the recovery process through time. A NHC Quick Response Field Grant supported field deployment to collect benchmark (9 month post-event) ‘ground truth’ datasets for informing the remote sensing analysis and validating results. During the nine day deployment within the Hurricane Katrina impact area, the field team documented a range of recovery characteristics. The pattern of recovery activities, ranging from debris collection to volunteers rebuilding homes, is quite variable. This documented variability likely captures the demographic and economic variability as well as the temporal signature of recovery efforts. This paper will discuss the characteristics of recovery and a remote sensing field approach to the study of the recovery process.