ARIA Damage Proxy Map: Japan, Typhoon Hagibis, Tokyo, 12 Oct 2019, v0.4

The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, in collaboration with the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), created this Damage Proxy Map (DPM) depicting areas in Japan that are likely damaged (shown by red and yellow pixels) as a result of Typhoon Hagibis that made landfall as a Category 3 storm Saturday night (October 12) local time. The map was derived from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data acquired around 6am (local time) on October 13, 2019 by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). The pre-event images were taken before (October 7, 2019) and the post-event image was acquired within 12 hours after the hurricane's landfall. The map covers an area of 250 by 350 kilometers, indicated with the big red polygon. Each pixel measures about 30 meters across. The color variation from yellow to red indicates increasingly more significant ground surface change. Media reports provided anecdotal preliminary validation. This damage proxy map should be used as guidance to identify damaged areas, and may be less reliable over vegetated areas and flooded areas. For example, the scattered single colored pixels over vegetated areas may be false positives, and the lack of colored pixels over vegetated areas does not necessarily mean no damage. Copyright: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019) processed by ESA, the ARIA team at NASA-JPL and Caltech, and EOS. This task was funded by NASA Disasters Program.