The sponsor is the military so the user case is probably a war.

> The problem set given to the hackathon teams from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) focused on counter-UAS, AI/ML, and RF/Electronic Warfare.

All sort of landscape changing events happen in a war. Buildings burn or are bombed and leveled, dams fall and terrain is flooded, etc. The military won't rely on the satellite images in Google Map. They'll load their own fresh images. If they're not fresh enough, they'll wait until they have them.

In reports about the war in Ukraine it's common to read that FPV drones don't fly because of adverse atmospheric conditions, which could be too much wind, fog or rain. Or too many electronic warfare systems from the enemy, which is one of the points of this exercise. The drone will be shielded.

Edit: snow also changes the look of the terrain.

clearly could be a problem...but you are really looking at feature extraction / terrain analysis and best guessing with what is available (little different to a human doing the same job). The main thing here is that storage is so cheap and light that these these systems become easily possible. Terrain, features + building heights...filter if you need on building height / terrain...work with what is left...