Improving rapid flood impact assessment: An enhanced multi-sensor approach including a new flood mapping method based on Sentinel-2 data

Abstract

Rapid flood impact assessment methods need complete and accurate flood maps to provide reliable information for disaster risk management, in particular for emergency response and recovery and reconstruction plans. With the aim of improving the rapid assessment of flood impacts, this work presents a new impact assessment method characterized by an enhanced satellite multi-sensor approach for flood mapping, which improves the characterization of the hazard. This includes a novel flood mapping method based on the new multi-temporal Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) that uses multi-temporal statistics computed on time-series of Sentinel-2 multi-spectral satellite images. The multi-temporal aspect of the MNDWI improves characterization of land cover over time and enhances the temporary flooded areas, which can be extracted through a thresholding technique, allowing the delineation of more precise and complete flood maps. The methodology, if implemented in cloud-based environments such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), is computationally light and robust, allowing the derivation of flood maps in matters of minutes, also for large areas.The flood mapping and impact assessment method has been applied to the seasonal flood occurred in South Sudan in 2020, using Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope satellite imagery. Flood impacts were assessed considering damages to buildings, roads, and cropland. The multi-sensor approach estimated an impact of 57.4 million USD (considering a middle-bound scenario), higher than what estimated by using Sentinel-1 data only, and Sentinel-2 data only (respectively 24% and 78% of the estimation resulting from the multi-sensor approach). This work highlights the effectiveness and importance of considering multi-source satellite data for flood mapping in a context of disaster risk management, to better inform disaster response, recovery and reconstruction plans.