Near real-time monitoring of river ice in support of flood forecasting in Eastern Canada: towards the integration of Earth observation technology in flood hazard mitigation

Remote sensing of lake and river ice

“…While satellite imagery can help monitor the evolution of ice jams, fronts, and flooded areas, there is a need to improve models to help forecast flooding and become early warning systems (e.g., Puestow et al, 2004). The FRAZIL system, developed by Gauthier et al (2007Gauthier et al ( , 2008, is a GIS-based system designed to support winter river-flow modeling and ice-related flood forecasting.…”

Intelligent Imaging on Board Small Observation Satellites

“…Computational intelligence techniques such as neural networks and fuzzy logic have been used to predict the next flooding event [13]. Recent work has incorporated multispectral and microwave images in a flood forecasting system [14]. An effective warning system should release warnings 72, 48 or at least 24 hours in advance [15].…”

Full Issue in PDF / Numéro complet enform PDF

“…Although a complementary automated approach is proposed by Maillard et al (2005), SAR images of sea ice are usually processed and interpreted by a specialist to determine ice type, surface concentration, and development stage. The growing interest in using SAR images for river ice mapping started with RADARSAT-1 and its fine-beam mode (8 m resolution), which enabled the monitoring of medium-size rivers (Weber et al, 2003;Puestow et al, 2004;Gauthier et al, 2006;Unterschultz et al, 2008). Given that the radar signal is sensitive to the ice roughness (surface scattering) and to the shape, size, and density of air inclusions within the ice cover (volume scattering) (Gherboudj et al, 2007;, it can be used to discriminate different freshwater ice types or ice formations.…”