Hydrological extremes such as floods have enormous environmental, social and economic consequences and it is expected that climate change effects combined with a growing population in ill-planned flood-prone coastal and riverine areas will increase their impacts in the future. With more lives and assets at risk, governments are increasingly investing in flood reduction measures to improve or at least maintain the current safety level. Understanding historical trends in flooding greatly enhances the ability of flood managers to take action and to address the underlying risk. The HASARD mapping algorithm that was recently implemented on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Grid Processing On Demand (GPOD) environment enables systematic, automatic and reliable spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar-based (SAR) mapping of terrestrial water bodies. The proposed pilot intends to upscale and operationalize the HASARD service so that a water bodies and floodwater record is generated at large scale and over a long period to support flooding-related disaster risk reduction In Europe. By contributing to a better understanding, monitoring and prediction of risks of extreme weather events and enabling a better resilience of our societies to such events, the pilot directly connects to the sustainable development goals 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) and 13 (Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts).
LIST, SMHI
Global Flood Partnership (chair: Joint research centre)
(W) 20 m resolution Sentinel-1 and 150 m resolution ENVISAT image collections (2002 - 2018) over Europe, (W) 0.125 deg European scale daily hydraulic flood simulations from ECMWF, (W) hydrological discharge simulations from SMHI,
The final 'default' product will be a database ("record") of flooding-related observations derived from >6 years of 20 m resolution Sentinel-1 observations made over Europe:
In addition, higher level products will be derived from the 'default' product based on specific user requirements (e.g. maximum flood extent map, aggregate monthly extent map, number of persons affected by floods, critical infrastructure impacted by floods, etc.).
The e-shape project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 820852