AI for Good

Chapter 16Damage Assessment Following the 2023 Earthquake in Turkey

—Caleb Robinson, Simone Fobi, and Anthony Ortiz

Executive Summary

After the earthquake in Turkey on February 6, 2023, our team used artificial intelligence methods and high-resolution satellite imagery to assess the extent of damage to buildings in the affected region. Specifically, we partnered with Turkey's Ministry of Interior Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency to deliver building-level damage estimates for four cities in southeast Turkey using satellite imagery collected during the first three days of the disaster. We estimated that 3,849 buildings were damaged or destroyed across the four cities. We found the city of Kahramanmaraş most heavily affected, with 7.44 percent of buildings in the city sustaining some level of damage visible from satellite imagery.

Why Is This Important?

Climate change, the spread of the human population, and humanity's increasingly effective ability to respond to disasters suggest that monitoring for and rapidly assessing disasters will become progressively important in the future. The availability of data from satellites that can map the entire Earth daily, and at a very granular level, tremendously helps disaster assessment and emergency response: those images can provide “before” data that can be compared to current data to assess changes in building structures, which indicate damage.

The incredible volume of this data precludes its ability to be rapidly ...