Progress in integration of remote sensing–derived flood extent and stage data and hydraulic models

Abstract

The ability to monitor floods with sensors mounted on aircraft and satellites has been known for decades. Early launches of satellites and the availability of aerial photography allowed investigation of the potential to support flood monitoring from as far as space. There have been notable studies on integrating data from these instruments with flood modeling since the late 1990s. There is now a consensus among space agencies to strengthen the support that satellites can offer. This trend 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 or even advance flood modeling. This research goes considerably further than using a wet/dry flood map for model validation as in early studies of this type. Therefore, this paper aims to review recent and current efforts to aid advancing flood inundation modeling from space.

An algorithm for operational flood mapping from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data using fuzzy logic

“…This consideration implies that, as stated by Schumann et al (2009b), SAR is unable to extract flooding from urban areas, even though an attempt has been recently carried out by exploiting the high resolution TerraSAR-X instrument (Mason et al, 2010). An analytical evaluation in closed form of the electromagnetic return from a building was accomplished by Franceschetti et al (2002) for the simplified scenario represented by a building isolated from other man-made structures, i.e., a parallelepiped placed on a rough surface.…”

“…Examples are the Mississippi flood of 1993 (Brakenridge et al, 1994), the 1996 and 1997 inundations in the Red River Valley (Barber et al, 1996;Wilson and Rashid, 2005), the August 2002 Elbe river flood (Henry et al, 2006), the overflow of the River Thames in 1992 (Horritt et al, 2001), the 2006 event of the River Dee in Wales (Schumann et al, 2009a), the River Mosel flood of 1997 and the 2003 event on the River Alzette floodplain (Schumann et al, 2007). Reviews of the state of the art in flood remote sensing were provided by Smith (1997), Sanyal and Lu (2004) and by Schumann et al (2009b).…”

Metric-Resolution 2D River Modeling at the Macroscale: Computational Methods and Applications in a Braided River

“…First, it has been recognized that height and velocity data to constrain spatially distributed flow models are generally quite limited (Schumann et al, 2009), as is the case here. Available data for calibration/validation are limited to two and four points within the mesoscale and macroscale models respectively, while the model domains consist of hundreds of thousands of cells (unknowns) at the mesoscale and millions of cells at the macroscale.…”

Improving Flood Prediction Assimilating Uncertain Crowdsourced Data into Hydrological and Hydraulic Models

“…The potential of assimilating distributed value of water level from remote sensing for improved discharge and water depth estimation has been explored in different studies (e.g. Andreadis et al, 2007;Neal et al, 2007;Hostache et al, 2010;Matgen et al, 2010;Biancamaria et al, 2011;Giustarini et al, 2011;Mason et al, 2012;García-Pintado et al, 2013;Andreadis and Schumann, 2014) and a detailed review is presented by Schumann et al (2009) and Yan et al (2015).…”