Sentinel-2 captured the fault line through Palu, Indonesia

On Sep 28 a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Palu, in Sulawesi Indonesia. The quake was followed by a tsunami. The animation below shows two Sentinel-2 images before and after the earthquake in Palu. If you look closely you can see the horizontal displacement due to the fault movement through the city. It also shows the damages caused by the tsunami wave.

 

Apart from the fault line there is a general shift between the images due to an inaccurate multi-temporal geolocation of Sentinel-2 images. A reprocessing is planned by ESA to improve the coregistration of Sentinel-2 images using ground control points from a global reference image. The post-event image was acquired by Sentinel-2A on October 02. The coregistration is better if one take as a pre-event image an image acquired by Sentinel-2A too on September 02.

By the way, the fault movement is also visible using Landsat: 

But the mis-registration is also evident if Landsat images are taken from two different orbits:

Definitely a shaky place..

At larger scale, the same images reveal the landslides which occurred in the aftermath of the earthquake (click on the image to compare both images with a slider)

This could be the worst landslide disaster in five years.

Plus d'actualités

The missing link to valorize CESBIO’s applicative research works

=>  My colleagues at CESBIO are extremely creative! Over the past ten years, they have developed a wide range of new products and methods for extracting information from Copernicus data. They don’t just develop and validate the method on a few sites; they continue their work until they have produced data for the whole of […]

Le chaînon manquant dans la valorisation des travaux de recherche en télédétection

=> Mes collègues du CESBIO sont très créatifs ! Ils ont mis au point, au cours des dix dernières années, un grand nombre de nouveaux produits et de méthodes d’extraction de l’information à partir des données Copernicus (Sentinel-1 et 2). Et bien souvent, ils ne s’arrêtent pas à la mise au point de la méthode […]

Sentinel-2 overtakes Landsat in scientific litterature

OpenAlex is a new, yet already very useful, open database for exploring scientific literature. For an upcoming blog post on the CNES Datacampus website, I analysed the proportion of papers that used only one of the Sentinel-2 or Landsat missions, as well as those that used both, in 2025. What struck me was that Sentinel-2 […]

Rechercher