Discussion

In conclusion it is safe to assume that reconstruction of Soma and the surrounding area is continuing at a steady rate, unfortunately it will take much more time to see the power infrastructure match it's levels from 2010 due to the damage from the tsunami being so extensive.

I found it difficult to get change detection to work between the two full color satellite images. Every band I used to analyze never reported the complete amount of damage and misrepresented other ares. I believe that this was caused due to different lighting atmospheres on the images, and this caused the change detection to select false positives and miss key negatives. I played with just about every feature of the tool, but could not seem to get it to work how I wanted it too. This feature worked quite well for the Night Light imagery however, which leads me to believe that there was something wrong with our Google Earth Images. Another problem we encountered was a lack of satellite images to use that were free. Due to the more focused nature of our topic, none of the images on GloViz, the site we were primarily taught to use, were adequate. All other images outside the ones used for Google Maps/ Earth were ones that required accounts we did not have or payments. Its not that the images online were bad, there were some excellent images of Japan and the area we were interested in that were cloud free, it was just that none of them possessed nearly a high enough resolution. Upon going through some of the demo projects, I ran into images from something called UNOSAT, however did not really discover this until trying to put everything together. Altogether though, I think in the end the project came together quite nicely and got the key point across that there still three years later is work that is being done to recover from this disastrous tsunami.

Further research could be done to measure the extent of agricultural damage, as well as a more in depth look into the reasons why lighting and urban construction in some areas devastated by the tsunami are recovering quicker than others. There are many facets of this natural disaster's effects that are open to be explored.