From hurricanes along the Gulf Coast to atmospheric rivers in the Pacific Northwest, extreme weather events are intensifying in every region. For state and local government agencies, utilities, and environmental organizations, one challenge looms large after every storm: When roads are washed out and conditions remain hazardous, how do you quickly and safely evaluate damage to infrastructure and across vast areas?
Lens helps organizations rapidly assess storm damage using satellite imagery and powerful geospatial tools—all in one intuitive platform. With up-to-date imagery and automated change detection, Lens enables your team to identify flooding, infrastructure damage, vegetation loss, and shifting river conditions in hours instead of weeks.
When surveying post-storm damage, not only are the hardest hit areas often inaccessible, but teams are met with unsafe ground conditions and the tall task of assessing vast geographic regions that can take weeks to cover on foot. Traditional ground-based surveys simply can't match the speed and scope that modern recovery efforts demand.
Lens is a remote monitoring platform transforming how organizations respond to major storm events with high-resolution satellite imagery, hydrology datasets, and intuitive monitoring tools. Whether you’re an emergency management agency prioritizing field response, a utility assessing power line or access road damage, or a conservation team tracking erosion and habitat change, Lens gives you the actionable insight you need to make informed decisions and accelerate recovery—no GIS expertise required.
Comprehensive geospatial data: The Lens library gives your team access to leading public and commercial datasets, including truecolor imagery and specialized datasets like Sentinel-1 surface water, Sentinel-2 surface moisture, and vegetation health indicators.
Before/after comparison tools let you conduct rapid visual assessments by placing pre-storm and post-storm imagery and data side by side, making damage patterns immediately apparent.
Analysis tools in Lens help determine the exact timing and extent of damage. With the ability to select affected areas on a map, you can easily quantify how many acres were impacted, even across large regions.
Automated change notifications keep your team informed by flagging when new imagery becomes available or when significant on-the-ground changes are detected, so you're always working with the latest information.
Measurement and annotation tools help you document damage with precision, creating detailed records that support insurance claims, grant applications, and remediation planning.
Contextual overlays provide critical reference information, including flow lines, designated flood zones, and building envelopes, helping you understand how observed conditions relate to infrastructure and risk areas.
Easy exports and sharing capabilities streamline reporting and field coordination, letting you quickly distribute findings to stakeholders, field crews, and decision-makers.
Lens is designed to work across different dimensions of disaster impact, supporting all facets of post-storm analysis.
Flood and water extent mapping becomes straightforward when you can compare pre- and post-storm imagery to identify exactly where water overtopped riverbanks, filled floodplains, or inundated previously dry areas. Emergency management and government agencies can use these insights to prioritize response zones, support FEMA reporting, and plan long-term resilience projects.
Riparian and river corridor change detection helps natural resource departments and conservation organizations understand how storms reshape waterways over time. Teams can identify erosion patterns, channel shifts, bank failures, and debris deposits that may affect habitat, water quality, and future flood risk.
Vegetation and land cover impacts reveal the storm's ecological footprint. Conservation and forestry teams can spot areas of tree die-off, blowdown events, or canopy loss that indicate ecosystem stress or heightened fire risk, while land managers can plan restoration and hazard mitigation efforts.
Infrastructure assessment enables utilities and public works departments to evaluate roads, trails, and built assets across large service territories. Lens makes it easy to spot washed-out roads, damaged culverts, blocked access routes, and compromised transmission corridors—helping field crews prioritize repairs and restore essential services faster.
To see how this type of work comes to life, explore some of our real-world examples: surveying trail damage after a powerful storm in Colorado and monitoring shoreline change in Florida. These projects highlight how Lens can be used to visualize impacts, document conditions, and inform recovery efforts across environments and storm events.
As natural disasters become more frequent and more severe, organizations need scalable remote monitoring workflows to respond swiftly and effectively. State and local agencies, utilities, and environmental groups can leverage Lens to inform how they plan, assess, and recover from major storm events. Even when peak-storm imagery isn't immediately available, post-storm visuals from satellite imagery and other remotely sensed data reveal crucial insights into what happened and what needs attention now.
Ready to see how Lens can strengthen your post-storm assessment capabilities? Get in touch.
.png)