Rapid Mapping Services for emergency response use SAR data and optical data for evaluation of flooded areas, earthquake damage assessment, landslides hazard evaluation, oil spill detection and for other natural and man-made post-event assessment. Time user requirements for availability of the products are very tight and only in some cases they can be fulfilled.
GeoMAP has direct access to a variety of VHR SAR and Optical satellites greatly reducing acquisition, processing and mapping times, between them GeoEye-1 and IKONOS VHR optical satellites, and COSMO-SkyMed and  RADARSAT  SAR constellations.
 

Earthquakes

Earthquakes are one of the most serious natural events effecting large areas world-wide, often causing destruction and massive loss of life. VHR Optical data are used for very detailed mapping allowing more effective rescue intervention.
Mapping include pre and post disaster data analysis and satellites data integration with different information layer such as road network, cadastre information and others. Different kind of data from different sources concurs to the creation of damage assessment analysis, trafficability analysis, pollution risk evaluation, oil spill detection map, fire detection map and others.
To facilitate volcano risk management, during the prevention and crisis phase, a continuous monitoring of terrain movements by means of differential interferometric analysis of SAR data allows evaluation of the uprisings associated with volcanic activity.

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Floods

SAR reflectivity data are used in hydrology for flooded area detection, information about soil moisture in non-vegetated terrains can also be extracted from multipolarimetric data. The advantage of using SAR data compared to optical data is mainly the all-weather capability of SAR, typically flooded areas remain cloudy for many hours after an event.
SAR data allow improvement of hydrological applications for two main reasons. First of all the very short revisit time is necessary to evaluate the flooded areas just after the peak of flooding, because if the satellite acquisition is too late respect to the time of the event, the evaluation can be misleading or also impossible. In case of large events, the short revisit, allows also for a monitoring of the event with the possibility to reconstruct the event history.