Abstract

In September 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall in southern Georgia, causing severe flooding and widespread destruction. Disaster recovery programs were inaccessible for heirs property owners due to title difficulties. The NASA DEVELOP team worked in partnership with The Georgia Heirs Property Law Center (The Center) to identify potential heirs properties impacted by Hurricane Irma. We created flood extent maps, a socioeconomic overlay, and identified potential areas of structural damage. We utilized surface reflectance data from Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) and backscatter data from Sentinel-1 C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR). We produced flood extent maps by consolidating these Earth observations in NASA SERVIR’s Hydrologic Remote Sensing Analysis for Floods (HYDRAFloods) tool in Google Earth Engine (GEE). To produce one socioeconomic overlay, we used Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal (CAMA) data to identify areas of heirs properties likelihood. To identify potential structural damage, we used optical imagery data from PlanetScope and RapidEye. Our flood extent map results found that backscatter data was more reliable than surface reflectance, resulting in mainly coastal flooding. With these maps, we created one socioeconomic overlay for Camden County. Lastly, we found only nine potential instances of structural damage in Albany, Dougherty County. These end products will allow The Center to make informed decisions about the allocation of funds for heirs property disaster assistance.