Imagery interpretation guide: assessing wind disaster damage to structures
This guide provides the first standard method for conducting geospatially-based damage assessments through the analysis of drone and satellite imagery. The “BAR Methodology” offers potential improvements to wind disaster damage assessments in terms of providing responding agencies with previously unavailable information about hard to reach, often non-permissive environments, at a scale and speed not possible through ground-based counts of damaged structures. At present, accepted methodologies for wind disaster damage assessments rely almost exclusively on responders having ground access to the affected area to document damage to housing structures. This approach can prove both time consuming and inefficient, and does not support the use of drones and satellites.