Discussion

Other Studies: Other studies have shown that the use of satellite imagery can help make a quick damage assessment. In 2004 it took over a week for the U.S. government to provide and support or aid, due largely to the fact that there was a lack of information regarding the damage. Our study along with others, prove that with remote sensing and satellite imagery, we can make quick early assessments of natural disasters on a global scale. With such knowledge accessible early, countries will be able to make a damage assessment and receive support in a timely fashion.

Limitations: For our project, one of the limitations we ran into was the inability to find extremely high resolution data. This prevented us from finding specific small-scale locations within the area and the inability to analyze data on the infrastructure that was damaged. For example, we could not zoom-in close enough on a community to analyze the buildings, streets, and agriculture destroyed.
Also, if we had access to property values in the Banda Aceh region, we could accurately estimate the costs of damages that incurred. Unfortunately for us, Zillow only works for buildings in the United States. If we could locate some of the in-country migratory statistics, we could break down where people have moved since the disaster and where citizens are restarting their lives.

Future Research: For future research in this realm, with grants or the ability to spend significant amounts of money, we could do a break down on the specific communities and how damaged they were by the tsunami. With more recent, expensive, high resolution data, we could analyze these specific areas and compare and contrast them and determine which locations were most significantly damaged and how they are rebuilding since the disaster. Personal interviews would also help tremendously in discover more of the emotional trauma that the Tsunami caused, and not just the physical trauma.