Wow look at this! You can actually see the flood waters flowing out of Houston and into The Gulf of Mexico from space!
Sigh, another tv journalist tweeting away without providing a timestamp, credit or source for the satellite material. That means everyone else must spend hours chasing down Landsats or Sentinel-1ABs trying to find the cloud-free scene at high resolution.
It turns out to be a Modis Terra 250m available at WorldView (momentarily down). Also seen on GOES16
https://tinyurl.com/ycfxgl69. Not good enough, we need the Sentinels here.
There'll be a big bathtub ring of mud defining the high water mark. Since houses in Houston are almost always higher than their lawns, if the street flooded but the lawn is still green, that house did not flood. Ditto for cars on that driveway. So this is a very unusual situation wherein oblique aerial photos are not needed for a damage assessment.
The flooded cars are probably totaled from the perspective of the insurance company, meaning the title gets automatically changed to 'salvage' and later to 'rebuilt' if someone can get them running again. These will be wholesaled at Denver auctions and redistributed all over the US with 'clean' titles and
wiped carfax histories to unwary buyers.
It is far too early for the White House to talk about the extent of damage -- 100k homes is just a wild guess. The real issue may be road beds, bridges, sewer and water lines. Costs to fix those are astronomic. However these these strong, self-reliant, white evangelical trump-voting (every single Gulf Coast county!) coastal Americans will reject anything that smacks of a gov't handout (?) as they have always done (?).
In the early days of Harvey, it was reported literally hundreds of times that GOES-16 was "not operational", even as the scientist or reporter was posting imagery from an obviously fully functioning satellite.
The geostationary GOES-16 was actually launched in November 2016 and became operational shortly thereafter (for those not needing the solar instruments, quantitative calibration or final East positioning). Its imagery packets are beamed down compressed but not encrypted and anyone underneath can download and unpack them at their home. That's operational from my perspective.
The advanced baseline imager is the primary weather instrument on GOES-16. It has sixteen spectral bands: two visible, four near-infrared and ten infrared. It's at higher bit depth and 4x better ground resolution than previous satellites in the series. Being 35,786 km up, it cannot take high resolution ground photos like Landsat or Sentinel.
The GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper images intra-cloud lightning 24/7 of severe storms even when high cirrus clouds obscure underlying convection from the ABI. Flash rate correlates with increased storm intensity. The telescopic CCD camera is tuned to 777.4 nm with a spatial resolution of 8 km, capturing 500 frames per second.