Mount Pinatubo, Philippines

This image from the Sentinel-1A radar satellite on 6 June shows part of the Philippine island of Luzon with Mount Pinatubo.

This active volcano experienced a major eruption on 15 June 1991 that injected more particulate matter into the atmosphere than any eruption since Krakatoa in 1883. In the months following, aerosols formed a layer of sulphuric acid haze around the globe, ozone depletion increased and global temperatures dropped by about 0.5°C.

In the upper-central part of the image, the dark area is Lake Pinatubo, which formed in the summit crater after the 1991 eruption. The water level has been rapidly increasing since its formation, putting pressure on the crater walls, which threaten to collapse and cause flash floods. The Philippine government has taken measures to alleviate the pressure with controlled draining.

South of Lake Pinatubo near the center of the image is Mapanuepe Lake, which also formed as a result of the 1991 eruption. When mud mixed with water and volcanic rock fragments flowed down from Pinatubo, it blocked the drainage of the river. The valley – including the settlements – was inundated. These mud and volcanic debris flows are still visible reaching west towards the South China Sea.

Other features visible in this image include the bright radar reflections from a shipyard on the Subic Bay to the south, and the vast expanse of aquaculture on the edge of Manila Bay in the lower-right corner.

Sentinel-1A was launched on 3 April, and is the first in a fleet of Sentinel satellites developed for Europe’s Copernicus environment monitoring program. Although the satellite is still being commissioned, images like this early example illustrate the kind of data the mission will provide.

This image is featured on the Earth from Space video program.

Image credit: ESA

Damage to Tacloban City, Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan

When Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded on Earth, struck the Philippines November 8, 2013, it tore a wide swath of destruction across large parts of the island nation. To assist in the disaster response efforts, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency, generated this image of the storm's hardest-hit regions, depicting its destruction.

The 40-by-50 kilometer damage proxy map, which covers a region near Tacloban City, where the massive storm made landfall, was processed by JPL's Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team using X-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar data from the Italian Space Agency's COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation. The technique uses a prototype algorithm to rapidly detect surface changes caused by natural or human-produced damage. The assessment technique is most sensitive to destruction of the built environment. When the radar images areas with little to no destruction, its image pixels are transparent. Increased opacity of the radar image pixels reflects damage, with areas in red reflecting the heaviest damage to cities and towns in the storm's path. The time span of the data for the change is August 19--November 11, 2013. Each pixel in the damage proxy map is about 30 meters across.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI

Note: For more information, see PIA17700: NASA Spacecraft Shows Before/After of Typhoon Haiyan's Devastation, NASA Damage Map Helps in Typhoon Disaster Response and NASA Peers Into One of Earth's Strongest Storms Ever.