A Flood of Ideas

Your challenge is to develop a new methodology or algorithm that leverages Earth observation and critical infrastructure datasets to estimate damages to infrastructure caused by flooding. Make a measurable impact on the resilience of nations by helping the Earth observations community contribute to the United Nations’ primary effort to reduce disaster risk!

floods of ideas

Summary

Flood monitoring from satellite data provides the opportunity to quickly and precisely overview flooded areas. The extent of the flooding and affected areas can be delivered to authorities, civil protection agencies or insurances. Delivered evaluations include information to better estimate risk in future and to prepare for protection measurements. As demonstration product the conducted mapping of the Elbe flood (08/2002) is presented. The use of data from radar-satellites, as ENVISAT and ERS, even allows the view through clouds. The evaluation of flooded areas enable improvements for planning e.g.declaration of risk areas. Large area evaluations allow to verify and improve model calculation

How We Addressed This Challenge

Flood are top-ranking natural disaster in terms of annual cost in insured and uninsured causes.

Many studies have been taken in scientific literature since 1970 s, about mapping and monitoring floods using data .


Based on a dynamic model and a sample of 442 municipalities from 2009 to 2014, it is found that damages to infrastructure have negative impact on municipalities current income balance and their annual results . This indicates a weakening of municipalities' financial situation


This project discusses about the existed development on flood disaster and new methadology

that leverage earth observation and critical infrastructure data sets to estimate damages to infrastructure caused by flooding . It also critically discusses planning policies, requirement, challenges and perspective action to prevent building and infrastructure during flood disaster using satellite remote sensing products.

How We Developed This Project

Boey says, " combined with other flood information sources ,satellite data can be definitely

be effective".


Flooding usually causes due to heavy rainfall ,melting ice or snow , increase in volume of water level in rivers which all depends on the weather and climate . This results in a great negative social impacts.


To address these challenges , that exist in making earth observation data more readily usable

and actionable in assisting flood disaster preparedness and response , the scientific community should seek collaboration with end users. The idea is that the focus should be on flood resilience rather than defense scheme.


A useful technique is by creating hydrodynamic simulations for our various river basins.

Originally these were physical scale models but numerical models running in computers

are increasingly important.


The idea behind the project was to use satellite data as an additional means of mapping flood extend in zones close to river as well as creating more accurate flood risk maps and carrying

out post - flood damage assessment


For imaging (mapping) the rivers corresponding to historical flood ERS and Envist Radar Image

were acquired .High resolution IKNOS and landsat EIM optical imagery became the basis of risk

maps with risk mapping you are combing three different variables,firstly ,the spatial extend-

which areas are flooded .Then comes the type of area will be affected;a flooded meadow won't

cause a much damage as an inundated urban area. The final variable is the return period-will

the flood recur once a year ,every ten years or every 100 years .The idea is that making ourselves familiarised with the area of earth observation and so making it much more likely

we will make operational use of future .


https://www.gdace.org/flooddetction

https://flood.umd.edu

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

In case of flood monitoring and response several organizations including space agencies like

NASA (National Aeronautics And Space Administration) and ESA(European Space Agency)

as well as many universities and research institutes used to provided many services like imagery and computer vision products which was useful in finding after affected flooded

areas in the world and to understand what limits the usefulness of monitoring capabilities.

There are also international initiatives and organisations comprising many different players,

that provided relevant services and geospatial data. For flood mapping ,SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) has the advantage to penetrate cloud cover and remains largely unaffected

by adverse weather condition in flood mapping and accelerated progress in flood forecasting.


https://floodibservatory.colorado.edu

Data & Resources

1. Deutsch, M.; Ruggles, F. Optical data processing and projected applications of the ERTS-1 imagery covering

the 1973 Mississippi River valley floods. JAWRA J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc. 1974, 10, 1023–1039. [CrossRef]

2. Robinove, C.J. Interpretation of a Landsat image of an unusual flood phenomenon in Australia.

Remote Sens. Environ. 1978, 7, 219–225. [CrossRef]

3. Schumann, G.J.P.; Domeneghetti, A. Exploiting the proliferation of current and future satellite observations

of rivers. Hydrol. Process. 2016, 30, 2891–2896. [CrossRef]

4. Schumann, G.J.P.; Moller, D.K. Microwave remote sensing of flood inundation. Phys. Chem. Earth Parts A/B/C

2015, 83–84, 84–95. [CrossRef]

5. Bates, P.D.; Horritt, M.S.; Smith, C.N.; Mason, D.C. Integrating remote sensing observations of flood

hydrology and hydraulic modelling. Hydrol. Process. 1997, 11, 1777–1795. [CrossRef]

Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 1230 18 of 19

6. Aronica, G.; Bates, P.D.; Horritt, M.S. Assessing the uncertainty in distributed model predictions using

observed binary pattern information within GLUE. Hydrol. Process. 2002, 16, 2001–2016. [CrossRef]

7. Horritt, M.S.; Bates, P.D. Evaluation of 1D and 2D numerical models for predicting river flood inundation.

J. Hydrol. 2002, 268, 87–99. [CrossRef]

8.Arguedas, M. H.; Campos, G. L.; Ballestero, C. R.; 2002: Análisis de posibles soluciones al problema de las inundaciones, en el cantón de Belén, producto del desbordamiento de la Quebrada Seca.; Universidad de Costa Rica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Escuela de Ingeniería Civil.

9.Serrano, L. S.; 2004: Modelación Hidráulica de la Quebrada Seca para el Control de Inundaciones en el Cantón de Belén; Universidad de Costa Rica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Escuela de Ingeniería Agrícola.

10.United States Department of Agriculture (USDA); 1986: Urban Hydrology for Small Watersheds TR-55, Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Tags
#Earthobservation #Bornworkshop #flood #humangeography data #4C-challenge
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.