Flood disaster monitoring based on Sentinel-1 data:A case study of Sihu Basin and Huaibei Plain,China

Summer floods occur frequently in many regions of China,affecting economic development and social stability.Remote sensing is a new technique in disaster monitoring.In this study,the Sihu Basin in Hubei Province of China and the Huaibei Plain in Anhui Province of China were selected as the study areas.Thresholds of backscattering coefficients in the decision tree method were calculated with the histogram analysis method,and flood disaster monitoring in the two study areas was conducted with the threshold method using Sentinel-1 satellite images.Through satellite-based flood disaster monitoring,the flooded maps and the areas of expanded water bodies and flooded crops were derived.The satellite-based monitoring maps were derived by comparing the expanded area of images during a flood disaster with that before the disaster.The difference in spatiotemporal distribution of flood disasters in these two regions was analyzed.The results showed that flood disasters in the Sihu Basin occurred frequently in June and July,and flood disasters in the Huaibei Plain mostly occurred in August,with a high interannual vari-ability.Flood disasters in the Sihu Basin were usually widespread,and the affected area was between Changhu and Honghu lakes.The Huaibei Plain was affected by scattered disasters.The annual mean percentages of flooded crop area were 14.91%and 3.74% in the Sihu Basin and Huaibei Plain,respectively.The accuracies of the extracted flooded area in the Sihu Basin in 2016 and 2017 were 96.20% and 95.19%,respectively.

Application of Fengyun-4 Satellite to Flood Disaster Monitoring through a Rapid Multi-Temporal Synthesis Approach

Fengyun-4 A(FY-4 A) belongs to the second generation of geostationary meteorological satellite series in China. Its observations with high frequency and resolution provide a better data basis for monitoring of extreme weather such as sudden flood disasters. In this study, the flood disasters occurred in Bangladesh, India, and some other areas of South Asia in August 2018 were investigated by using a rapid multi-temporal synthesis approach for the first time for removal of thick clouds in FY-4 A images. The maximum between-class variance algorithm(OTSU;developed by Otsu in 2007) and linear spectral unmixing methods are used to extract the water area of flood disasters. The accuracy verification shows that the water area of flood disasters extracted from FY-4 A is highly correlated with that from the high-resolution satellite datasets Gaofen-1(GF-1) and Sentinel-1 A, with the square correlation coefficient R2 reaching 0.9966. The average extraction accuracy of FY-4 A is over 90%. With the rapid multi-temporal synthesis approach used in flood disaster monitoring with FY-4 A satellite data, advantages of the wide coverage, fast acquisition,and strong timeliness with geostationary meteorological satellites are effectively combined. Through the synthesis of multi-temporal images of the flood water body, the influence of clouds is effectively eliminated, which is of great significance for the real-time flood monitoring. This also provides an important service guarantee for the disaster prevention and reduction as well as economic and social development in China and the Asia-Pacific region.