Tropical Cyclone Rapid Impact: A SAR Change Detection based product for Rapid Post-Cyclone Impact Assessment

Rapid post-tropical cyclone or hurricane impact assessment is critical for effective emergency response, early recovery, and informed decision-making. After landfall, tropical cyclones often produce cascading impacts, from extreme winds and storm surge to inland flooding, that affect buildings, critical infrastructure, and agricultural systems. Timely and spatially consistent information on where damage has occurred remains a key gap, particularly when cloud cover, access constraints, or sheer scale of impact area, limit ground-based assessments.

ICEYE’s Tropical Cyclone Rapid Impact product addresses this need by delivering near-real-time impact maps derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based change detection. The product detects building and infrastructure damage, storm-surge-affected coastal areas, and flooded agricultural patches, enabling rapid impact assessment across diverse hazard environments. Hurricane forecast models are used to anticipate storm tracks, allowing ICEYE to proactively task both pre and post-event SAR acquisitions over at-risk regions. To ensure robust comparisons, and adhering to radar physics principles, images are acquired with closely matched viewing geometries, i.e. same satellite pass direction, same look direction, and very similar incidence angles. SAR amplitude change detection is then applied to identify and delineate the most impacted areas.

By leveraging ICEYE’s satellite fleet and automated processing, actionable results are delivered within the first 24 hours after impact. These outputs are shared directly with government agencies, disaster managers, and other stakeholders, who use them to prioritize response actions, allocate resources, and communicate impacts. Quite recently, in the aftermath of Hurricane Mellissa, in a matter of a few hours, our Tropical Cyclone Rapid Impact results were used by the Prime Minister of Jamaica to inform the Jamaican Parliament about the estimated number of impacted buildings. This would have otherwise taken months to assess from ground. In addition, we have also provided meaningful insights during Hurricane Helene, Milton and Otis to our customers. In terms of accuracy metrics, we have been able to achieve >90% recall over the buildings destroyed by high velocity winds.

This work will showcase qualitative and quantitative results from multiple hurricanes and tropical cyclones, demonstrating how ICEYE’s SAR images and our robust SAR change detection algorithm is applied and how it strengthens rapid impact assessment and decision-support across the tropical cyclone cascade.

Link: https://www.iceye.com/solutions/insurance/hurricane-solution