Towards a continuous inland excess water flood monitoring system based on remote sensing data

• Main Authors: van Leeuwen Boudewijn, Tobak Zalán, Kovács Ferenc, Sipos György
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2017-11-01
• Series: Journal of Environmental Geography
• Subjects: inland excess water; sentinel 1; sentinel 2; monitoring; flood; water management
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/jengeo-2017-0008

Inland excess water (IEW) is a type of flood where large flat inland areas are covered with water during a period of several weeks to months. The monitoring of these floods is needed to understand the extent and direction of development of the inundations and to mitigate their damage to the agricultural sector and build up infrastructure. Since IEW affects large areas, remote sensing data and methods are promising technologies to map these floods. This study presents the first results of a system that can monitor inland excess water over a large area with sufficient detail at a high interval and in a timely matter. The methodology is developed in such a way that only freely available satellite imagery is required and a map with known water bodies is needed to train the method to identify inundations. Minimal human interference is needed to generate the IEW maps. We will present a method describing three parallel workflows, each generating separate maps. The maps are combined to one weekly IEW map. At this moment, the method is capable of generating IEW maps for a region of over 8000 km2, but it will be extended to cover the whole Great Hungarian Plain, and in the future, it can be extended to any area where a training water map can be created.