How a swell in imagery satellites is accelerating hurricane recovery

Kyle McCloud was running his computer on a generator after the remnants of Hurricane Helene wiped out power to his home in rural Lincoln County, Georgia earlier this month.

His coworkers at Umbra Space teased him every time he logged on to Slack. What the heck are you doing here?

But when a veteran McCloud knew from his Army days asked for help locating satellite imagery of Spruce Pines, North Carolina on the western side of the state, McCloud had work to do. He was able to get a helicopter pilot updated imagery of a landing zone less than 48 hours old. Several people were airlifted and evacuated. Lives may have been saved, his friend said in a social media post.

“I definitely had a sense of satisfaction of being able to utilize the tech, being able to utilize maybe a little bit of the experience to know that it was actually helping on the ground,” McCloud said.

The space economy is generating headlines for providing help following natural disasters, particularly as SpaceX offers free internet access to residents hurt by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. But as the number of satellites on orbit has skyrocketed in recent years, so has another potential avenue of assistance: the number of imagery satellites.

Satellite companies say they have been able to provide imagery, sometimes only hours old, to first responders and government agencies as a way to accelerate recovery efforts in the wake of damaging hurricanes. That means those same agencies can see which roads are blocked, which neighborhoods have lost their roofs and where there may be water where a building once stood. Those agencies, such as FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, are also purchasing more images.

“The last couple of years have been really groundbreaking for what is able to be done with commercial satellite imagery, mostly because there's more commercial satellite imagery available,” said McCloud, a customer engagement manager at Umbra Space. “Whereas previously, the government's really had most of the overhead imagery and the satellite imagery available to them. Companies like Umbra and Maxar and Planet [Labs] have been able to provide just so much more data to folks who generally wouldn't have had access to it.”

Umbra’s synthetic aperture radar satellites can capture images at day or night, can see through clouds and are described as “all-weather capable,” which can be helpful after such catastrophes.

At Maxar, the company boasts it collects approximately 5 million square kilometers of imagery each day. It has eight operational satellites, including four WorldView Legion satellites launched this year, in sun synchronous and mid-inclination orbits.

Thus far, the company has released 30,000 square miles of imagery that's available for public use as part of the recovery. The team there has also helped identify 40,000 structures across six states that have been damaged by the hurricanes with 30 centimeter resolution imagery, said Susanne Hake, general manager for U.S. government at Maxar Intelligence. That translates to each pixel representing approximately one square foot on the ground.

“Thirty-centimeter [resolution] allows you to see vehicles and buildings very clearly. You can see vegetation and that's a differentiator for maps,” Hake said.

The next step, in terms of disaster recovery, Hake said, is turning to artificial intelligence to run algorithms on top of the imagery that could help build maps of roads or footprints of buildings in advance of a severe weather event. Then, in the aftermath, the imagery can help better assess the damage, like seeing which houses have tarps on their roofs or which roads are damaged, faster than a human may be able to. That will be helped by some areas that can be revisited by satellites as many as 12-15 times a day.

Satellite imagery companies are also working with NGOs and other agencies to ensure the information is widespread.