Using cosmo-skymed data for flood mapping: Some case-studies

The COSMO-SkyMed mission is expected to give a fundamental contribution for flood mapping, because of the high revisit time and throughput achieved by the four satellites that form the constellation. To study the potentiality of COSMO-SkyMed radar data for this purpose, two inundation events are analyzed in this paper, namely the flood occurred in Myanmar in May 2008 and the event that took place in the city of Alessandria (Italy) in April 2009. For the first event, two radar images were considered, one temporally close to the peak of the event, and the other one acquired one week later. As for the Alessandria flood, a time series of images was available, so that an attempt to monitor the temporal evolution of the inundation was accomplished. ©2009 IEEE.