Planet makes available select imagery for major disaster events, including major earthquakes, floods, storms, wildfires, and human-made disasters. These are available here in a STAC Catalog under a CC-BY-NC license. See the Planet Disaster Data page for more information.
Post-event and pre-event Planet imagery of the M7.4 earthquake in western Colombia on 10 August 2026.
The mainshock struck at 12:34 UTC, with an epicentre 5 km south of San José del Palmar, Chocó (4.844°N, 76.242°W) at a depth of 110 km. That intermediate depth spread strong shaking across a wide area of the Pacific cordillera — Chocó, Valle del Cauca, Cauca and Risaralda — rather than concentrating it near the epicentre. USGS issued an orange PAGER alert, and an M5.0 aftershock followed at 13:18 UTC.
Post-event imagery begins the same day as the earthquake and continues through 18 August, with repeat coverage of Quibdó, the catalog's first Pelican scenes, and a clear-sky SkySat pass over rural Chocó.
This is a self-contained STAC / Portolan catalog: each STAC Item links its Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs by relative path, so the metadata and imagery travel together.
Collections are split pre-event and post-event around the 10 August mainshock. Because the post-event collections share acquisition dates, they are split by sensor as well as date.
Cloud cover is unusually low for Chocó in August: the 10 August PlanetScope pass has a median of 2% cloud (range 0–45%, only 6 of 57 scenes above 20%). The 10 August SkySat collects carry 36% cloud; the 11 August Cali collects are cloud-free; the 11 August Quindío scenes 7–9%; the 13 August Quibdó collects 12%; the 18 August Chocó collects 10%, with 80% of each frame fully clear — the cleanest imagery in the catalog.
Two caveats apply to the 13 August acquisitions. The Buenaventura Pelican collection is
the cloudiest in the catalog — 47%, 55% and 39% cloud, leaving only 37%, 29% and 51% of
each scene clear, which is expected on one of the wettest coastlines on earth but means the
UDM2 is essential. Two of its three scenes also report pl:ground_control = false, so their
absolute geolocation is uncorrected and may be offset by more than a pixel at 0.62 m —
co-register before differencing. The 13 August SkySat pass has a 13.6° sun elevation,
so expect long shadows and poorly lit north-facing slopes.
Two further notes on the 18 August SkySat collection. It carries no UDM2 — only the
single-band UDM — because the delivery was ordered as the visual and pansharpened bundles
rather than pansharpened_udm2; every other SkySat collection here has both. And extensive
pale alluvial workings and bare channel deposits are visible along the river through both
frames: these are a long-standing feature of this part of Chocó and should not be read as
earthquake damage without a pre-event comparison, for which only the ~4.8 m basemap is
available — roughly seven times coarser than these collects.
Note the baseline is a quarterly composite (1 April – 1 July 2026), not a single-date
acquisition, so it is a seasonal reference rather than an immediate before-image. Its Items
carry the full window in start_datetime/end_datetime.
Imagery © Planet Labs PBC, provided under the Planet Crisis Response Program, licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0 (non-commercial). See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Part of the Planet disaster-response collection: https://source.coop/planet/disasterdata.
| SkySat (~0.64 m) |
| 2 |
| visual, pansharpened, UDM2, UDM |
| Chocó, south of Quibdó — post-event | 2026-08-18 | SkySat (~0.66 m) | 2 | visual, pansharpened, UDM |
