Multi-Mission Flood Mapper: A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Data Based
Tool for Rapid Disaster Response
Abstract
Floods are convincingly the most frequent and widespread natural hazard
across the world. With an ample amount of literature forecasting
increase in its frequency and magnitude further in the future, highly
credible and efficient algorithms and tools are crucial for real-time
flood monitoring. In this study, a highly efficient tool, Multi-Mission
Flood Mapper, has been developed to delineate flood inundation extent
without any human intervention from SAR images captured by multiple
microwave SAR satellite missions, including ALOS PALSAR CEOS, ALOS 2
CEOS, COSMO-SkyMed, ENVISAT ASAR, ERS 1/2 CEOS, ERS 1/2 SAR(.E1, .E2),
ICEYE, JERS CEOS, KOMPSAT-5, PAZ, RADARSAT-1 & -2, RCM, SAOCOM, SeaSat,
Sentinel-1, TerraSAR-X, and TanDEM-X. The efficacy of the developed tool
is assessed by performing a test on a significant number of flood events
in India having diverse flooding patterns and landforms. To manifest the
performance of the tool, the step-by-step processing at the backend of
the tool is discussed in detail in this study by taking a flood event
along the Ganga River in India as a case study. The algorithm of the
tool includes various processing steps: pre-processing that incorporate
applying orbit file, calibrate to sigma naught, speckle filtering,
terrain correction and linear to decibel conversion; thematic analysis
that involves multi-segmentation and Otsu’s thresholding techniques;
post-processing that consists of the elimination of hill shadows,
applying majority filter, and masking out permanent water bodies. Thus
derived flood inundation layer is observed to be highly accurate
compared to the master image. The total time taken by the tool for
processing is about 4 minutes for the given image. The developed tool
would be beneficial for rapid flood inundation map generation on a
timely basis for flood monitoring and relief management during a
disaster. In addition, the flood inundation layers can also be used for
calibration/validation of hydrological/hydraulic models, geospatial
planning, and generating flood hazard maps. Also, the Multi-Mission
Flood Mapper tool is facilitated with a user-friendly Graphical User
Interface (GUI), making it look simple and easy to use.