Abstract
Floods are among the top-ranking natural disasters in terms of annual cost in insured and uninsured losses. Since high-impact events often cover spatial scales that are beyond traditional regional monitoring operations, remote sensing, in particular from satellites, presents an attractive approach. Since the 1970s, there have been many studies in the scientific literature about mapping and monitoring of floods using data from various sensors onboard different satellites. The field has now matured and hence there is a general consensus among space agencies, numerous organizations, scientists, and end-users to strengthen the support that satellite missions can offer, particularly in assisting flood disaster response activities. This has stimulated more research in this area, and significant progress has been achieved in recent years in fostering our understanding of the ways in which remote sensing can support flood monitoring and assist emergency response activities. This paper reviews the products and services that currently exist to deliver actionable information about an ongoing flood disaster to emergency response operations. It also critically discusses requirements, challenges and perspectives for improving operational assistance during flood disaster using satellite remote sensing products.
Highlights
Remote sensing technology, from space, allows measurements to be obtained over spatial scales much larger than may be covered by field-based instruments and methods
The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) hosts the Global Flood Detection System (GFDS, http://www.gdacs.org/flooddetection) that monitors floods worldwide using near real-time (NRT) passive microwave remote sensing from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E), a product that is used by the Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) to determine satellite-based discharge
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a steady proliferation of satellite sensors apt to assist during disaster response and recovery operations
Summary
From space, allows measurements to be obtained over spatial scales much larger than may be covered by field-based instruments and methods. SAR has the advantage to penetrate cloud cover and remains largely unaffected by adverse weather conditions that often persist during high-impact flood events [4] This has led to greater reliability in flood mapping and accelerated progress in flood forecasting and flood inundation model development, in the area of model calibration and validation [5,6,7,8,9,10,11], and more recently assimilation [12,13,14]. As a direct consequence of the significant progress in research in recent years, the science of remote sensing of floods has become mature enough to deliver products and services for decision-making and operational applications, such as flood disaster response assistance This is not without any obstacles, and the main challenge lies in maintaining adequate targeted application readiness levels and high interoperability of products and services being delivered. It should be noted that there are many more Earth Observation (EO)-based products and services that are becoming available to assist disaster response than are reported hereafter (see Alfieri et al [20] for more specific case studies)
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