It has been almost one year since the earthquake and tsunami hit Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and other Indian Ocean countries. The European Space Agency has a story about how satellites (and, by extension, mapping) is helping the rebuilding process in those countries.

A segment of ESA’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative is known as Respond and is intended to “addressing the geospaital information requirements of the humanitarian aid community.” Following the earthquake and the tsunami, Respond “carried out a large amount of rapid mapping in the immediate days to follow creating over 210 individual maps involving more than 19 different satellites.” A number of these maps and satellite images are available on the ESA website.

Higher resolution maps and images can be viewed on Respond’s own website, along with other images of past disasters, including the Kashmiri earthquake. Plenty more maps and images are available if you follow some of the links on this site.

By way of La Cartoteca.