Viewing Beirut’s Destruction Using Remote Sensing

The New York Times is currently hosting a nice application showing two pictures of southern Beirut before and after the start of the Israeli strikes.

The first picture was taken on July 12th and the second is taken on July 31st. Destructions in this area are evident, but I’d be curious to see the destructions in the other areas of the city, where Hezbollah was not as present as this one.

It’s not the first time that differential satellite imaging has been used to detect destructions. Earlier this year, we have seen a set of pictures of a settlement in Zimbabwe that has been completely destroyed in the span of a couple of years.

August 7th, 2006 | Earth Sciences and Geomatics

2 comments

For the difference in the colors between the photographs, it’s probably due to the fact that they were not taken using the same satellite, so they do not have the same imaging capabalities (taking a guess here). I’ll try to find a bit more on this.

As for the Zimbabwe pictures, the best I can find is from the AAAS press release, cited by Jason Kottke at his blog:

The images, analyzed by the AAAS staff, show two views of the settlement of Porta Farm, located just west of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The first, an archived image from June 2002, shows an intact settlement with more than 850 homes and other buildings; an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 people lived in Porta Farm at the time. The second photo, taken by satellite on 6 April this year, shows that the settlement has been leveled.

It’s the kind of pictures that really makes you think about how many things are going on around in the world and which we would not know about, if it were for some people who prefer to speak loudly about it…

Comment by Julien — August 13, 2006 @ 9:36 pm

Holy Cow. Those pictures look like one is in black and white and one is in color…is that possible that it’s really the same place from above??

Also-on the pictures of Zimbabwe-were the houses burnt down? It appears like nothing was ever there in the second one!

Comment by Emma — August 13, 2006 @ 1:32 pm