Remote Sensing of Floods and Flood-Prone Areas: An Overview

Abstract

Klemas, V., 2015. Remote sensing of floods and flood-prone areas: An overview. Journal of Coastal Research, 31(4), 1005-1013. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.River floods and coastal storm surges affect the lives of more people than most other weather-related disasters. Floods can destroy homes, roads, and bridges; tear out trees; cause mudslides; and take many human lives. During flooding, timely and detailed situation reports are required by disaster management authorities to locate and identify affected areas and to implement damage mitigation. Remote sensing systems on satellites and aircraft can provide much of the required information for delineating the flood-affected areas, assessing the damage, and feeding models that can predict the vulnerability to flooding of inland and coastal areas. In this article, I provide an overview of remote sensing and modeling techniques for forecasting the vulnerability to flooding of an area, determining the extent and intensity of the flooding, and assessing the damage caused by the flood.ADDITIONAL INDEX WORDS: Flood remote sensing, coastal flooding, storm surge, river flooding, flooding vulnerability, flood damage assessment.

Review article: Detection of inundation areas due to the 2015 Kanto and Tohoku torrential rain in Japan based on multi-temporal ALOS-2 imagery

“…SAR systems have been used widely in disaster situations such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, typhoons and floods (Weissel et al, 2004;Feng et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2013;Dumitru et al, 2015;Yulianto et al, 2015). Klemas (2015) and Lin et al (2016) summarized recent research on flood assessments using optical and SAR sensors. Because microwaves exhibit specular reflections against a smooth water surface, water regions in a SAR image show low backscattering intensity.…”

Advances in Remote Sensing of Flooding

“…Although remotely sensed data have been used to assess the damage from local to regional extents (e.g., [2,14,15,[17][18][19]), estimates of possible structure damage and monetary loss, which are two key components in the flood risk analysis, are still a challenge. Using high resolution optical satellite data and airborne LiDAR data, Gerl et al [20] derived a land cover classification and map of urban structure types, and then input them into their multi-parameter flood damage models including regression tree models.…”

“…A flood event occurs. The awesome power of the floodwater threatens human lives, damages infrastructure and buildings, and may trigger mudslides [1,2]. For example, the Yangtze River flood in China in 1931 was the most deadly flood event in the 20th century.…”

A Spectral Unmixing Method with Ensemble Estimation of Endmembers: Application to Flood Mapping in the Caprivi Floodplain

“…Flooding is a natural hazard that causes more damage than any other natural hazard [1][2][3]. Flood plains are often densely populated and most vulnerable to flood events.…”

“…Obtaining flow data is often challenging because many of the river systems that are prone to flooding are ungauged, inadequately gauged, or have gauges that are unreliable due to poor maintenance [5,6]. For hydrological data-scarce and spatially extensive floodplains in remote regions, earth observation is the only viable and cost-effective alternative for mapping inundated areas [2,3]. The lack of available flow data, augmented by restricted access, leads to data gaps that make effective and timely monitoring of river basins difficult.…”