FLOODING LEVEL ESTIMATION IN URBAN AREAS WITH SAR IMAGES

The main aim of this paper is to evaluate the level of flooding in proximity of sensible targets in urban areas using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. To this purpose two approaches are possible: Local Approach and Global Approach. The Local approach is based on just one SAR Image (in this case, the post-event SAR image) and allows the evaluation of the water level in proximity of the selected local target; to this aim, the a-priori knowledge of the target ground truth and two gauges in the premises is required. The Global approach, instead, relies on a couple of SAR Images (pre and post-event) and permits to retrieve the flood level at a global scale all over the image once co-registration and calibration procedures have been performed. Here just the Global approach is presented and then compared with results coming from the application of the Local approach in previous studies. The approaches are tested on High Resolution (HR) TerraSAR-X images: the first acquired during the flooding occurred in the Gloucestershire in July 2007 and the second one year later in normal weather conditions

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