Humanitarian OSM Team/Open Mapping Hub - Latin America and The Caribbean/Activations/2025 Caribbean Response Hurricane Melissa
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Context of the ActivationIn late October 2025, Hurricane Melissa struck the Caribbean as a Category 5 storm, bringing catastrophic winds and heavy rainfall across Jamaica, Haiti, and eastern Cuba. The hurricane caused severe flooding, landslides, and widespread infrastructure damage, leaving thousands of families displaced and many communities isolated. This activation focuses on mapping affected areas to support ongoing response, recovery, and resilience efforts, particularly in Jamaica and Haiti, by improving access to up-to-date geospatial data for humanitarian partners and local authorities.
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Contacts
- Caribbean: Arnelle Isaac - arnelle.isaac@hotosm.org
Hashtag
- All contributions on Tasking Manager are tracked with a unique change set comment tag: #2025_LACH_CAR_TC
- ohsomeNow Stats page for tracking overall contributions
Timeline
- Start: 27 October, 2025
- End: 1 March, 2026
Remote Mapping Coordination
- List of active projects in Tasking Manager: Check Campaign here.
Map and Data Services
Accessing OpenStreetMap data
Vantor Open Data Program for Melissa
110 pre and post-hurricane satellite images have been released by Vantor (Maxar) under CC-BY-NC-4.0 through their Open Data Program, across Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos.
In order to be used for improving OSM the Vantor images need to be processed and uploaded to OpenAerialMap (OAM). However, given the full release involves over 1.3 terabytes (TB) of imagery, its processing and uploading had to be prioritized. Therefore, an assessment of the images was made in early November 2025, with conclusions:
- 24 are pre-event images, which should de-prioritized for upload, unless there is a need to have very up-to-date imagery prior to Melissa
- 82 are post-event images
- 18 of which are black and white (panchromatic) and cannot be used for our purposes
- 10 only capture the ocean
- 39 are too cloudy to use for mapping
- 15 are cloudy but not too cloudy for mapping, of which there are:
NOAA Imagery
A series of very high resolution images (including drone captures) was released by NOAA partially covering Jamaica and captured from 31 October onwards (i.e. several days after the Hurricane hit Jamaica on 28 October).
The NOAA imagery has been released under CC0-1.0 (public domain), so it can be used to map in OSM.
This imagery is being used to carry out coordinated mapping of damage in Jamaica, see associated projects here.
Other relevant resources
- The United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) interactive web application
- Copernicus Rapid Mapping platform for Melissa
- Microsoft: AI building damage assessment for Jamaica
- GDACS Satellite Mapping Coordination System (SMCS) for Melissa
About This Disaster Activation
About HOT
To learn more about the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), explore more of our wiki-pages (root: HOT) or our website hotosm.org. HOT is a global community, mostly of volunteers, and it is a US registered nonprofit able to contract with organizations (email info at hotosm.org to contact our staff), we are also a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
History of this Activation
This section will be updated live as new information becomes available.
- On October 23rd, five days before Melissa made landfall in Jamaica, HOT assessed the level of completeness of base OSM data (buildings and roads) in Jamaica and found that it was relatively complete due to the extensive mapping of Jamaica that had occured during the COVID-19 activation in 2020
- On October 27th, HOT joined the Jamaica Flying Labs, UWI Mona’s Caribbean School of Data, and the Land Information Council of Jamaica (LICJ) through its National Emergency Response GIS Team (NERGIST) launched a ChatMap activation, an interactive tool developed by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) that combines chat and mapping to crowdsource on-the-ground updates across Jamaica. Through ChatMap, residents are invited to share photos, videos, and locations of flooding, road or bridge washouts, landslides, rockfalls, fallen trees, and power lines. This crowdsourced information enables responders and communities to better understand and respond to the impacts of Hurricane Melissa as they unfold. It is being updated once and twice a day. To participate, people simply:
- Share their location via WhatsApp.
- Send a photo or video of the situation.
- Add a short caption describing the incident. Each report contributes to improving situational awareness, guiding emergency response, and strengthening Jamaica’s resilience in the face of Tropical Storm Melissa.
Members of the Humanitarian Mapping Brigade are supporting this effort by collecting coordinates and location details from local residents to help georeference audiovisual materials shared by community members. The exercise is being conducted under the guidance of HOT, in collaboration with local partners and the Government of Jamaica. See the map here
- 4 November 2025 - HOT published Tasking Manager projects in response to local needs for up-to-date geospatial data, supporting humanitarian partners and local authorities in assessing damaged buildings across Jamaica. Ongoing discussions with Haitian and Cuban authorities aimed to extend similar mapping support as needs arose.
- 8 November 2025 - HOT published a Tasking Manager project to map damaged buildings in Cuba using post-event satellite imagery released by Vantor (Maxar) through its Open Data Program
Data Quality
Validation: This is restricted to users with more than 500 changesets in OSM.
OSMCha
A specific OSMCha filter can be used to detect data quality issues across a wider area.
For Mappers
How You Can Contribute
Tasking Manager Projects
See a dynamic list of all Tasking Manager projects associated with this response here.
Mapping Priority in Tasking Manager
- Please choose from highest priority first.
- We call for local mappers to prioritize local knowledge on the area.
- The call is for basic, intermediate and experienced mappers.
- Experienced mappers are also asked to participate in validating completed tasks. Information on validating can be found here.
Mapping Instructions
HOT Tasking Manager
- We have simplified the damage assessment to a single tag only when you observe damaged buildings. Use:
damage:Melissa=yes. This streamlines the mapping process and speeds up outputs. - If you are validating a task and the mapper used the previous, multi-level damage tags, you may keep those tags, but ensure the building also includes the main tag:
damage:Melissa=yes. - We have reinstated the “additional tags” section, which requires both the assessment date and imagery source. Use the following tags for all buildings:
damage:Melissa:assessment=IMAGERY_DATEsource:damage:Melissa=NOAA/Vantor