Extraction of water and flood areas from SAR data

Medium resolution SAR satellite data have been widely used for water and flood mapping in recent years. Since 2007 high resolution radar data with up to 1 m pixel spacing of the TerraSAR-X satellite are operationally available. The improved ground resolution of the system offers enormous potential for water detection. However, image analysis gets more challenging due to the large amount of image objects that are visible in the data. Water body detection methods are reviewed with regard to their applicability for TerraSAR-X data. Flood detection approaches for rapid disaster mapping are presented in this paper.