Análisis de la evaluación de daños en edificios basada en imágenes de satélite y aéreas en el ámbito de Copernicus EMS Mapping

The Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) is a publicly funded programme of the European Union, coordinated by the European Commission that provides all the actors involved in the management of natural disasters, man-made emergency situations, and humanitarian crises with geospatial information, mainly based on satellite imagery. It includes an Early Warning and Monitoring system and a Mapping component with a Validation module. The latter assesses the quality of EMS products and fosters the improvement of the EMS, in the scope of which this study was carried out. Within the Mapping portfolio, grading products aim to evaluate the intensity and spatial distribution of the damage resulting from an event, assessed for different features, such as settlements, building blocks, transport network or land-uses. Damage categories for settlements and building blocks were initially defined and based on the European Macroseismic Scale-1998 (EMS-98). This article shows the double function of the validation module. On the one hand, this article shows the results of the validation of four building damage maps carried out by Copernicus EMS, on the other, analyses the aptitude of the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98), defined to assign damage in situ, to categorize damage to buildings from different types of images (satellite images, oblique images and orthophotos). The main conclusion is that the EMS-98 categories cannot be directly interpreted for  damage assessment based on satellite imagery and an operational approach could be used instead, in line with previous studies.