The Impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico's Land Cover and Local Convective Processes

This work shows the advantage of tracking land damage and change/recovery caused by extreme weather events with a suite of different sensors. On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, a powerful Category 4 hurricane made landfall on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico. Winds approached 150 mph as the storm travelled diagonally across the island towards the northwest, bisecting the entire island and causing immense damage. In addition to the intense wind, massive flooding occurred at multiple sites as rainfall rates exceeded 170 mm per hour. One year after Maria, the island is still recovering from the storm's major impact on the natural ecosystem and vegetation. The work herein employs multispectral remote sensing platforms such as Landsat 8, Sentinel-2, Worldview-4 and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to investigate vegetation damages caused by the hurricane and the subsequent recovery. Changes in Vegetation Index (VI) are compared pre (2016) and post event (2017) as well one year (2018) after the occurrence of Hurricane Maria. Results illustrate the rapid drop in vegetation across the Island of Puerto Rico and subsequent recovery month by month. The resiliency of different vegetation types at diverse land cover, topography and slope gradient was investigated and determined. Key locations in Western Puerto Rico were identified and selected for cross validation amongst the different observing platforms at different spatial resolutions. Moreover, ancillary meteorological data was used to investigate the effect of abrupt changes in vegetation cover on local atmospheric convective processes and precipitation.