Monitoring of Flooding in Urban Areas

Urban areas are crowded environments, where a disaster can bring dramatic consequences, if not adequately forecasted and faced. Remote sensing instruments can be fruitfully used for both prediction and aid organization purposes. In particular, in this paper we present innovative synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques for the detection of a flooded area in urban settlements. A SAR raw signal simulator is presented and used, in order to improve the comprehension of the main physical phenomena and to plan the most adequate sensor characteristics for detection purposes. The single and multiple scattering phenomena, in conjunction with strong layover effects make the SAR images relative to urban areas extremely involved. The presented study is focused on a canonical environment, in order to provide a complete and powerful instrument for the comprehension of the complex texture of urban area SAR images.