Using a Sensorweb for High-Resolution Flood Monitoring on a Global Scale

Flooding has serious environmental and humanitarian effects. To track these effects, previous work has used remote sensing to achieve global monitoring at low to moderate resolutions or regional monitoring at high resolutions. We proposed that implementing a new sensorweb that had previously been prototyped only regionally in Thailand could combine moderate-resolution flood detection with targeted high-resolution observations to enable worldwide high-resolution flood monitoring. Furthermore, we aimed to integrate both commercial and government satellites into this sensorweb to improve upon previous efforts, which only used government satellites. To this end, we first gather data from several moderate-resolution sensors to identify large, flooded regions. We then task high-resolution sensors to observe these floods and analyze the resulting data, thus enabling global high-resolution flood monitoring. Overall, our approach improves worldwide analysis of floods, which can be further improved by our ongoing efforts to incorporate more flood detection sensors and generate more products.