Extraction of damaged urban areas due to the 2023 Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, earthquake using ALOS-2 images

A series of earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria on February 6, 2023. It caused serious damage in the cities and towns in the East Anatolian fault zone. In response to the request from the Turkish Government, Sentinel Asia launched an emergency response event on the same day. In this study, we extracted possible damaged areas using pre- and post-event ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 intensity images under the emergency observation. Urban footprint data were introduced because seasonal changes were significant in non-urban areas. The combination of the difference and correlation coefficient of the intensity from HH-polarization was calculated to identify changed areas. The results were verified by comparing with high-resolution optical satellite images.