Post Typhoon Haiyan EROS B Imagery of Tacloban, Philippines - Apollo Mapping
Posted on December 3rd, 2013

Post Typhoon Haiyan EROS B Imagery of Tacloban, Philippines



The destruction and human suffering left in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan is stark and tragic. Slamming into southern Philippines with winds recorded at 194 miles per hour and a storm surge approximately 17-feet tall, Haiyan laid waste to nearly everything in its path. One of the hardest hit cities was the regional capital on the island of Leyte, Tacloban, with a population of 215,000+. At the time this article was written, Haiyan had been blamed for nearly 4,000 deaths with more than 1,600 still officially missing.

Just several days after the landfall of Haiyan on November 7, 2013 over the Philippines, the ~70-cm panchromatic satellite, EROS B, collected low cloud-cover imagery over the most devastated areas of Tacloban. ImageSat, the owners of EROS B, shared this data with us and our readers of The Geospatial Times. As there was no pre-typhoon EROS B imagery available, we selected three areas with extreme damage to feature in this short piece.

Each of these images were collected on November 13, 2013 at 68-cm resolution. We enhanced each to make them as crisp as possible. In the first image, you can see three large ships (each well over 20-meters long) that were washed ashore on the north end of the beach. You can also see that the vast majority of standing structures were wiped out by the storm surge.

In this second image, you can also see the extreme devastation of the smaller structures and even the massive structure in the center had a large section of its roof ripped off.

In the final image, you can see a massive amount of debris and rubble left along the center of the coastline.

If you would like more information on the panchromatic satellite EROS B, you can refer to our website here or send an email to sales@apollomapping.com.

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2 responses to “Post Typhoon Haiyan EROS B Imagery of Tacloban, Philippines”

  1. Doug Olcott says:

    If the Eros B satellite was launched on April 25, 2006, why are there no previous images of these sites collected by this satellite? Is this a limitation of the flight path of the satellite or were previous images simply not archived? Also, were these images captured at night or duing the day? How well can they be compared to images from other satellites of these areas?

    • Admin says:

      Thanks for the comment Doug and good questions.

      There are no previous images archived as no one ordered imagery of this location in the past for a new collection. EROS B tends not to spend time on speculative collections – rather they do a really great job of new collections by focusing satellite time here.

      These images were captured in the day.

      These images will look slightly better than IKONOS data and rather similar to QuickBird but just in black and white only.

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