By: Laurie Fickman
On the morning of June 6, 2023, a substantial portion of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine – vital for water management and hydroelectric power generation – suffered a collapse while under Russian control.
New findings published this morning in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, from a University of Houston spaceborne-monitoring team, indicate the dam may have had deformation hotspots before the war, pre-dating the actual collapse.
"Through our analysis, we observed displacements characterizing different segments of the dam, up to two years prior to the actual collapse," reports UH assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Pietro Milillo.
In the article, Milillo and team present the results of a methodology called InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) which measures infrastructure deformation from space with millimetric accuracy using radar images of the Earth's surface collected from orbiting satellites.
Continue reading at Cullen College of Engineering.
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