Improving Urban Flood Mapping by Merging Synthetic Aperture Radar-Derived Flood Footprints with Flood Hazard Maps

Remotely sensed flood extents obtained in near real-time can be used for emergency incident management and as observations assimilation into forecasting models. High-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors have the potential to detect urban areas through clouds during both day- night-time. This paper considers a method detecting flooding by merging SAR with model-derived hazard maps. allows two-way symbiosis, whereby currently available extent improves future model predictions, while maps after overpasses improve estimate of extents. The estimates using backscatter only rural adjacent ones. It was compared an existing returns areas. solely gave average detection accuracy 94% false positive rate 9% more accurate than method.