Tag: Flood Mapping
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How AI Detects Flood Changes Across Optical and SAR Images With Few Training Pairs
In brief: Instead of separately mapping water in pre- and post-flood images and then overlaying the results, the method first maps water features from optical and SAR imagery into a more consistent semantic space, then directly identifies where water conditions have changed. More importantly, it does not require large numbers of real flood-change labels: it…
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Can Optical Satellites Keep Tracking Floods When Clouds Block the View?
In brief: Landsat and Sentinel-2 can capture flood details well, but they are most vulnerable to the very condition that often accompanies major flooding: cloud cover. Rather than trying to generate a visually plausible cloud-free optical image, this study directly reconstructs whether the surface beneath the clouds is water or non-water. The researchers combined Harmonized…
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Can SAR Map Floods Without Manual Labels or Threshold Tuning?
In brief: Conventional SAR-based flood mapping often runs into two obstacles: thresholds must be adjusted repeatedly by hand, while supervised learning requires large volumes of labeled data. This paper proposes Felz-CNN, also known as the adaptive unsupervised Felz-CNN segment system (AUFCS). The method first uses Felzenszwalb superpixels to divide a SAR image into many internally…
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What Really Caused Pakistan’s 2022 Floods: Extreme Rainfall, Snowmelt, or Glacial Lake Outburst Floods?
In brief: Published in Remote Sensing of Environment, this study does more than use Sentinel-1 data to map Pakistan’s catastrophic 2022 floods. It seeks to answer three broader questions: How much of the country was flooded? Why was the disaster so severe? And was it worse than the major flood of 2010? The authors developed…
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A Decade of Sentinel-1 Scanning the Globe: How Much Flooding Have We Been Missing?
Key takeaway: Several global flood datasets already exist, but their long-term records rely primarily on optical remote sensing from satellites such as MODIS and Landsat. Yet the most severe floods often occur under thick cloud cover. The real question this study seeks to answer is not “How can we detect floods one more time?” but…