Iran Satellite Data Reveal Scale of US-Israeli Strikes

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1:51Sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. We work with some really cool people at Bloomberg. We absolutely do. who we're going to talk to next. Who is part of a team behind today's Big Take. Krishna is a data journalist, background in digital signal processing, machine learning, applied mathematics. At Bloomberg, he specializes in satellite imagery, remote sensing, remote sending, geopolitical spatial analysis.

2:33He's also an adjunct professor at the Cooper Union, and he joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. So perfect person to do this story. Krishna, it's good to have you on the program. It is today's Big Take. It's one of the most read on the terminal. It's an analysis of satellite data, and reveals the scope and scale of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. First, before we get to what you found, which is just absolutely remarkable, how did you do this? Because we reported early on in the war that some of the publicly available satellite imagery at the request of the U.S. government was being held back.

3:08So the public couldn't view that. And we know how difficult it is to get information and photos out of Iran. So how did you guys do this? Absolutely.

3:16Krishna Karra:Yeah. So commercial satellite images. So these are the ones that are taking the really high resolution shots, the ones that we're used to looking at. You know, you can see the building damage really clearly. They were they were transmitting and people are able to see them like the first week of the conflict or so. And then, yeah, basically they turned off. Right. And so but the free data, the public data from NASA, the public data from the European Space Agency, that stuff is still collecting. and that stuff is still available. So we've been in touch with these researchers at Oregon State at part of this Conflict Ecology Lab.

3:52Krishna Karra:And what they do is they specialize in using publicly freely available radar data to map damage. And so basically as soon as they were able to produce that data over Iran, we were able to do our analysis on top of it. But first step back, how do they even access that when you're in a war, in a conflict, Like were some of those images some might consider important for national security regions? Absolutely. And that's why the commercial stuff turned off. So this free data that's still collecting that the researchers use that we can go access and look at, this is at a much lower spatial resolution.

4:27Krishna Karra:Okay. Not so granular. Exactly. So if you looked at the image over some buildings, for example, it would look pretty blurry. You might not really know what you're looking at. It's not going to reveal any sort of sensitive military operations. You can't track troops or troop movements or things like that with this kind of data. But radar data in particular is really sensitive to deformations that are happening on the ground. And so the researchers, what they do is they can take that data and from that basically produce these damage clusters that show you where buildings have been damaged, even if we don't have the high resolution data to then go visually inspect it the way we normally would.

5:07Okay, so that's the high level, the satellite view. Let's zoom in a lot because you and the team found that within damage clusters in Tehran, 2 ,816 buildings were hit, 32 % of which were linked to the military, 25 % to industry, 21 % to civilians, 19 % were commercial, and 2 % were governmental. So this idea of damage clusters, are these targets? How are these related to the military? What did you find?

5:41Krishna Karra:Yeah, I think this is a great question and kind of gets at how do you spatially contextualize what damage means? So, you know, we're used to looking at precision strikes where, you know, especially with modern warfare and technology, right, where, you know, you have a very precise impact crater over one particular building, you know, and I think an easy assumption you can make is that there's kind of no collateral damage necessarily, or that like, there isn't necessarily an impact around that place. But thinking about damage in terms of not just a particular place that was targeted, but a neighborhood, right?

6:17Krishna Karra:Something that's kind of extending beyond what the initial, where the strike was targeted. And especially in places like Tehran, places like Esfahan, where they are pretty dense. And, you know, there's all these mixed land use types within particular buildings. There's kind of, you really can't avoid the collateral damage in a sense, right? So when you think about damage in that kind of spatial sense, the analysis that we did was that we just took publicly available land use data. This is from OpenStreetMap, OvertureMaps. And we just basically saw how those lined up with the damage clusters. And what we saw was that there's all these mixed use types.

6:53Krishna Karra:And I think that gets at the broader impacts of this, which is you really can't just say, especially in dense urban environments, that something that is a military target isn't going to have real impacts to all these other land use types. So in other words, too, what you're saying, especially in something like Tehran, where there are dense areas, I mean, there is military side by side with civilian. Absolutely. I hate the word collateral damage, but right, like it's said that, but unfortunately, this is war, right? And this is what happens, whoever it is. So it happens. The one thing I I thought was interesting.

7:28And I think about the thing that we've talked so much about this, that it was about going after the uranium. What did you guys find when it came to that area? Or were there no pictures around that? Was it mostly Tehran? Yeah.

7:43Krishna Karra:So we looked at damage across the country, which the kind of scale and the breadth of the damage was surprising. Like it's not concentrated in just a few large cities, but it's kind of scattered across small towns. We didn't look at uranium specifically, and the land use analysis that we did was limited to Tehran and Esfahan. And that's really because of the limitations of the actual land use data that we have. This is really scattered in terms of how well it's defined throughout the country as compared to a place like the United States. And that goes back to national security. I'm sure access in terms of seeing.

8:19I was just curious. I wanted to say what the U.S. Department, the administration replied to this analysis. The Department of War achieved all of the objectives laid out under Operation Epic Fury. Iran's ballistic missiles are destroyed. Their production facilities are demolished. Their navy is sunk and their proxies are weakened. Our warfighter struck 13 ,000 targets since the beginning of a major combat operations. The United States does not target civilians. And the Israeli Defense Forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Yeah, war is complicated and tricky, and we know that, and we appreciate that comment, certainly from the government.

8:55Krishna, in doing this process, I don't know, what was your main takeaway from all of it? We've got about a minute left.

9:02Krishna Karra:Yeah, for sure. One thing to note, just kind of piggybacking off that comment a little bit, the researchers estimated 7 ,600 or something buildings across the country that were damaged. That's a very conservative estimate, even by their estimation. That's just because of how granular the data is. It is not super high resolution. And so that's certainly an undercount. And so that's just something to keep in mind. But yeah, even just looking at the scale across the country, it really is pretty widespread. Kind of devastating. Sure. It's definitely not like wall-to-wall damage that we've seen in other conflicts like in Gaza or even in parts of Ukraine and Russia, for example.

9:44Krishna Karra:It's not that kind of damage, but the scale of it is quite significant. Chris Nakara, senior reporter, covers satellite imagery for Bloomberg News. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Check out the story on the terminal. Check it out at Bloomberg.com. It's an incredible visual investigation, deep analysis of satellite imagery. It's about the satellite data and what it reveals for the scope and scale of U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.

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