Hacker News
Planet Labs Runs an Open Disaster Imagery Feed Publishing as Fast as 1.4 Hours After Capture
A September 2026 walkthrough documents Planet Labs' public Disaster Data feed, hosted on Cloudflare with metadata as Parquet and JSON and imagery as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs, queryable directly from DuckDB and QGIS. Resolution runs 0.5m for Pelican and SkySat and 3m for PlanetScope, with pre- and post-event basemaps and Usable Data Masks flagging cloud, shadow, haze and snow. The author pulled 93 GeoTIFFs of Colombia earthquake basemap tiles (1.7GB raw, 327MB as WEBP) and 1.9GB of Nepal flood SkySat imagery. Images have appeared as fast as 1.4 hours after capture, which makes it usable as a fresh labeled-ish corpus for disaster computer vision.
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