My Google Map Blog

We recently came across this interesting story about damage maps that NASA created after the Nepal earthquakes last year. We dug a little deeper and found this story on the NASA website, which includes a link to the damage maps viewable in Google Earth.

Grab the KML here. Be sure to also check out the layer labelled “NGA_All_Damage_Nepal_April_30th_2015_points“, which is not turned on by default. It shows the location of damage that has been confirmed. It appears to cover a slightly different area than the damage map and we did identify damage in the imagery on the right hand side of the damage map not covered by this layer.

The damage map is clearly not completely accurate, as it does not have a one to one correspondence with the actually identified damage. According to the NASA article it is based on change between satellite radar images between November 24, 2014 and April 29, 2015. As a result, a lot of changes not related to damage have been picked up. At the top left of the damage map a river really stands out. This is because river beds tend to change significantly over time.

The NASA damage map based on changes between radar images.

The map of directly identified damage overlaid on the NASA damage map.

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