Evaluating the impact of flood inundation with the cloud computing platform over vegetation cover of Ganga Basin during COVID-19

Abstract

Around the month of July 2020, the people suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic got added burden of disastrous floods. The current study tries to understand the impact of flood inundation on the vegetation cover across the Ganga Basin with the help of a cloud-based computing platform like Google Earth Engine (GEE) in a near real-time scenario. This offers a semi-automatic scheme with customized algorithms to process the large scale of datasets to further analyze and derive the required information from space-based satellite images like Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The direct impact of floods on vegetation cover is assessed with the satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI). The results of post-flood NDVI and EVI readings showed a considerable reduction due to the protracted flood water submergence. The results show the flood extent maps for the selected regions for the lower Ganga Basin having inundations in parts of Bihar and West Bengal. This affects the settlements, agricultural land, and vegetation cover with damage to the large population. The outcomes of the work may be utilized to assess the precise flood-inundated areas at a faster rate to offer a faster response even in the pandemic.