Planet Crisis Response — Colombia Earthquake (2026)

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 13 August, with repeat coverage of Quibdó and the catalog's first Pelican scenes.

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.

Contents

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.

Coverage

• PlanetScope — two passes at 15:31 and 16:18 UTC, roughly 3–4 hours after the mainshock, covering 76.63°W–75.20°W, 2.61°N–5.42°N. This spans the cordillera from Risaralda south through Valle del Cauca to Cauca, and includes the epicentre.
• SkySat (10 Aug) — two collects at 19:56 UTC, about seven hours after the mainshock, over Quibdó, the capital of Chocó and the largest population centre in the affected department. Note this is ~105 km north-northwest of the epicentre, not over it.
• SkySat (11 Aug) — three collects at 12:44 UTC the following day, forming a strip across Cali (~2.2M people), the largest city in the shaking footprint, ~143–164 km south of the epicentre. All three are cloud-free.
• PlanetScope (11 Aug) — two scenes at 16:04 UTC over the Quindío coffee axis, 75.90°W–75.55°W, 4.34°N–4.69°N, about 60 km east of the epicentre. 7–9% cloud.
• Pelican (13 Aug) — three consecutive scenes from one strip at 15:44 UTC over Buenaventura, Colombia's principal Pacific port, 77.17°W–76.87°W, 3.81°N–3.95°N, ~138 km south-west of the epicentre. An east–west swath roughly 34 km by 15 km across the port frontage and the island city centre.
• SkySat (13 Aug) — two collects at 12:01 UTC, a second pass over Quibdó on the same footprint as 10 August, supporting three-day change detection.
• Basemap baseline — 93 quads covering 77.17°W–75.06°W, 2.64°N–6.32°N, a footprint that contains every post-event collection.

Notes

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%.

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.

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.

License & attribution

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.