Syria: damage assessment of missile attack with Sentinel-1A

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.

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.

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/

2 thoughts on “Syria: damage assessment of missile attack with Sentinel-1A

  1. That is interesting. Though, it is called “Syria” or “Syrian Government”, as internationally recognised, rather than “Bashar al-Assad / Syrian regime”.

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