Abstract
A two-component fully automated flood monitoring system is described and evaluated. This is a result of combining two individual flood services that are currently under development at DLR’s (German Aerospace Center) Center for Satellite based Crisis Information (ZKI) to rapidly support disaster management activities. A first-phase monitoring component of the system systematically detects potential flood events on a continental scale using daily-acquired medium spatial resolution optical data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). A threshold set controls the activation of the second-phase crisis component of the system, which derives flood information at higher spatial detail using a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) based satellite mission (TerraSAR-X). The proposed activation procedure finds use in the identification of flood situations in different spatial resolutions and in the time-critical and on demand programming of SAR satellite acquisitions at an early stage of an evolving flood situation. The automated processing chains of the MODIS (MFS) and the TerraSAR-X Flood Service (TFS) include data pre-processing, the computation and adaptation of global auxiliary data, thematic classification, and the subsequent dissemination of flood maps using an interactive web-client. The system is operationally demonstrated and evaluated via the monitoring two recent flood events in Russia 2013 and Albania/Montenegro 2013.
Highlights
The application of satellite captured earth observation imagery for monitoring and mapping flood events has proven useful in numerous crisis situations
The multi-scale flood monitoring system based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and TerraSAR-X data is demonstrated for two recent (2013) flood scenarios in Russia and Albania/Montenegro
Each pixel of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is checked against the classification result of the MODIS data and labeled into three classes according to the following criteria: flood detected by TerraSAR-X and MODIS, flood detected only in TerraSAR-X data and flood detected only in MODIS data (Figures 6 and 7)
Summary
The application of satellite captured earth observation imagery for monitoring and mapping flood events has proven useful in numerous crisis situations. High resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from the satellite missions TerraSAR-X, Radarsat-2, and the Cosmo-SkyMed constellation (CSK) have been increasingly employed by commercial and non-commercial entities for the derivation of detailed and valuable information on inundation extent in flood affected during rapid mapping activities. The potential of these data has been demonstrated by several previous investigations to support flood emergency situations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. This depends on the uplink and downlink situation between ground stations and the satellite, the geographic latitude of the AOI and the selected spatial resolution of the data and the swath width of the sensor
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