Global Flood Mapper: a novel Google Earth Engine application for rapid flood mapping using Sentinel-1 SAR

Pratyush Tripathy () and Teja Malladi ()
Additional contact information
Pratyush Tripathy: Indian Institute for Human Settlements
Teja Malladi: Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2022, vol. 114, issue 2, No 11, 1363 pages

Abstract: Abstract Timely and accurate information about the extent of floodwater is critical for emergency planning and disaster management efforts. Despite the advances in computational resources and in the field of remote sensing, there is a clear gap that restricts the disaster community from leveraging the technological resources in real time, which impedes on-ground response efforts. To bridge this gap, this paper makes two contributions. First, the paper presents a new web application, the Global Flood Mapper (GFM) that allows the user to generate flood maps quickly and without getting into technical intricacies. To derive the flood extent from Sentinel-1 satellite data, the pre-flood collection is considered as base and anomaly cells in the during-flood image(s) are identified using Z-Score values. Second, it advances an existing flood mapping method to (a) Map the peak of the floods by combining ascending and descending scenes when necessary, and (b) Check for false positives in hilly terrains by adding slope and elevation mask parameters. By comparing our results with Sentinel-2 MSI derived flood maps and field photographs, we show that the GFM can generate flood maps with precision. The GFM can be used to map and download the extent of multiple flood events of an area as vector data (.kml format), which can be a critical input for flood modeling and risk and impact assessments. The GFM shall enable first responders and practitioners across the globe to overcome technical barriers and lack of computational resources to map the extent of inundation during and after floods.

Keywords: Flood; Disaster; Sentinel-1; SAR; Google Earth Engine; Climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-022-05428-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:114:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s11069-022-05428-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-022-05428-2

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().