Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

The last few days, I've been spending some time looking at satellite photos of the Bahamas: Zooniverse announced that they were reactivating the "Planetary Response Team"* from Hurricane Maria, to locate/identify storm damage in the Bahamas after Dorian.

This is a little different from their usual crowdsourced science and document transcriptions, This is a crowdsourced project, so each pair of before-and-after photos is looked at by dozens of volunteers. I did this in 2017, after Hurricane Maria; apparently the information is useful enough to local emergency response workers, so another call went out. We have now gone through photos from Great Abaco and Grand Bahama islands, and are working on "North Bahamas" photos. This set is a bit odd because a lot of the before photos look like close-ups of Jovian clouds, or similar. In the first sets, some of the "after" photos weren't useful--usually because of clouds in the way--but they have pre-Dorian satellite photos of Grand Abaco and Great Bahama. The "after photos are also lower-resolution, which makes it harder and I would think less productive, but the people using the data want this. It's relatively easy and might be useful, so I continue.

I had stopped doing Zooniverse projects, even though I often enjoy them, to spare my hands, but this seemed more urgent as well as more important than counting leopards or transcribing the Civil War enlistment records of black soldiers. (I signed up for that one because I already know the style of handwriting they provided a reference card for.)

• That's not quite as good a name as "International Earth Rotation Service" (which is now the more prosaic International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service**), but I like it.

** A real organization, which I was reminded of by the mouseover text for today's xkcd.