Landscapes evolve extremely rapidly during and immediately after a natural disaster. Data collected during the first hours to days after an event provide critical information about the disasters causal mechanisms, but are hard to capture. Very high-resolution topographic surveys are traditionally expensive, difficult to quickly organize and so small in geographic extent that they often fail to sufficiently characterize all the effects of an earthquake, wildfire or flood.

We are extracting three-dimensional topography from old air photos of Antarctica collected by Navy expeditions. We are automating the process as much as possible using python scripting. These ice heights and trimlines will be used as constraints for ice sheet models. This project is nearing completion and is supported by NASA.