Milillo's Lab

Milillo's Lab

Multi-hazard disaster response

Mapping damage in the days after an event, not the months.

The problem

After an earthquake or a flood, the useful window for damage information is measured in days. Field reconnaissance cannot cover a region that fast, and optical satellites are stopped by cloud and by night. The constraint is not sensing capability but latency.

BeforeAfter high coherence: stable scattering coherence loss: candidate damage
Coherence measures whether the ground scatters radar the same way between two passes. Where it collapses and the terrain has not, something on the ground changed.

How we measure it

Radar sees through cloud and does not need daylight. We combine tasking of commercial smallsat constellations with interferometric coherence change detection, which flags where the ground scattering properties changed between passes. That is a proxy for structural damage that can be produced without a pre-event field survey.

What we have found

Gorkha 2015, Mw 7.8

Rapid damage mapping from synthetic aperture radar following the Nepal earthquake.

Commercial onramp

Evaluation of ICEYE, Capella and Umbra high-resolution SAR for low-latency multi-hazard damage mapping, under NASA's commercial smallsat programme.

Landslides

Spotlight interferometry over rural terrain, applied to the Slumgullion landslide, Colorado.

Papers on this theme 30

Showing the 12 most relevant of 30. See all 92 publications.

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