The Pentagon has released satellite photos of the Syrian base the U.S. attacked on 7 April 2017 in response to Bashar al-Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, marking the first time the US has become a direct combatant against the Syrian regime.

This satellite image released by the U.S. Department of Defense shows a damage assessment image of Shayrat air base in Syria, following U.S. Tomahawk Land Attack Missile strikes on Friday, April 7, 2017 from the USS Ross (DDG 71) and USS Porter (DDG 78), Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers. The United States blasted the air base with a barrage of cruise missiles on Friday, April 7, 2017 in fiery retaliation for this week’s gruesome chemical weapons attack against civilians. (DigitalGlobe/U.S. Department of Defense via AP)

Shayrat air base in Syria captureted by Sentinel-1A on 2017/04/17

Shayrat air base in Syria (Google Earth)

The photo show the aftermath of nearly 60 cruise missile strikes on the Shayrat airbase in Homs, a city in western Syria (white circles).

The damages are also captured by the Sentinel-1A with a RADAR sensor (mission of CopernicusEU). The following  figure shows the coherence band between two products (master and slave ) before and after the missile attack.

coherence band before the attack with product master of 20170405 and slave of 20170324

coherence band after the attack with product master of 20170324 and slave of 20170417

The coherence band shows similarity between pixels master image and pixels slave image in a scale from 0 to 1. Areas of high coherence appear bright. Areas with poor coherence will be dark.  For example vegetation  having poor coherence and buildings have very high coherence. Loss of coherence could be caused by temporal (time between acquisitions), geometric (orbit errors), volumetric (vegetation) or processing.

In the image of attack there is a poor coherence in the red circles corresponding to the points of attack declared by the Pentagon.

reference:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/06/trump-syria-missiles-assad-chemical-weapons

http://time.com/4731467/syria-airstrikes-photos/

http://www.e-geos.it/