Operational evaluation of damages in flooded areas combining Cosmo-Skymed and multispectral optical images

The management of a flood event requires singling out the affected area, quantifying the damages and programming an effective rescue plan. This requires rapid and easy access to all the geographical and observational information available for the target area. Optical imagery allow the identification of land uses, critical infrastructures and the extraction of important information to quantify the actual vulnerability of the area. In this case, the main advantage of satellite imagery is the much higher refresh rate with respect to classical in-situ surveys. When floods occur, the detection of flooded areas allowed by SAR observations such as those provided by Cosmo-SkyMed, helps in rapid and effective evaluation of the damage and organization of the management of the crisis. Here we present an integrated system developed by the team of the Italian Space Agency pilot project “Opera”. The system allows the end user to integrate multispectral high resolution imagery and Cosmo-SkyMed products, in a 3-D environment, providing all the tools to virtually survey the observed area and extract quantitative information for many features relevant to the emergency management. The system has been tested in real time on a prolonged flooding event occurred in Januray 2010 in the Shkoder plain in Albania.