Hurricane Michael: remote sensing-based assessment of vegetation damage, severity and recovery
Abstract
Hurricane Michael made a landfall in the Florida panhandle in October 2018 as one of the strongest hurricanes in the continental United States in recent history. With maximum sustained winds of 257 km/h, Hurricane Michael caused devastation across Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Strong winds uprooted and snapped trees, damaged tree crowns and led to a considerable financial damage, estimated at almost $1.3 billion, to the region's important timber industry. Hurricane winds also caused significant damage to croplands (like cotton), and other agricultural operations. We analyzed a time series of high resolution remote sensing imagery from Sentinel-2 platform to assess extent and severity of disturbance to vegetation. Using pre- and post-hurricane imagery we quantified the change in the vegetation indices as an indicator of disturbance. Using field based observations from vegetation damage surveys, we built a model to translate remote sensing derived reduction in vegetation greenness to disturbance severity. This remote sensing based study helps assess the impact of hurricanes at landscape scale across all vegetation types, not limited to just the regions or vegetation types surveyed. By continued tracking of vegetation during the post-hurricane period, we also studied the patterns of recovery of the vegetation. Recovery patterns show significant variability across vegetation types, such as forest vs croplands, and disturbance severity.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMNH44A..03K