Global real-time detection of major floods using passive microwave remote sensing

* Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author. ** Put sponsor acknowledgments here. Abstract – Space-based river monitoring can provide a systematic, timely and impartial way to detect floods of humanitarian concern. This paper presents a new processing method for such data, resulting in daily flood magnitude time series for any arbitrary observation point on Earth, with lag times as short as 4h. This results in a daily update of major floods in the world, with an objective measure for their magnitude, useful for early humanitarian response. The technique is demonstrated on the 2009 floods in Southern Africa.