Towards a global SAR-based flood mapping service

Abstract

This work presents a fully-automatic TerraSAR-X-based service for near real-time flood detection at a global level. Compared to semi-automatic flood detection approaches commonly applied in the rapid mapping community, automatic processing chains allow to reduce the critical time-span from the delivery of satellite data after flood events to the provision of satellite-derived crisis information (i.e. flood extent) to emergency management and decision makers. With respect to accuracy and computational effort, experiments performed on a data set of 150 different TerraSAR-X scenes acquired during flood situation all over the world with different sensor configurations confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed flood mapping service. These results have been further confirmed by means of an in-depth validation performed for three study sites in Germany, Thailand, and Albania/Montenegro.