Real time monitoring of flooded areas by a multi-temporal analysis of optical satellite data

Optical sensors aboard meteorological satellites are an excellent tool to monitor floods and support the flood risk management cycle, mainly thanks to their high temporal resolution, which allow us to obtain real time and frequently updated information on environmental changes. The RST (Robust Satellite Techniques) approach, an automatic change detection scheme, has been already applied using AVHRR (Advanced very High Resolution Radiometer) and MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data to detect and monitor flooded areas. Results achieved have shown its capability in automatically identify flooded areas with a low rate of false alarms, also discriminating permanent water from actual inundated areas. In this paper, in order to further assess the reliability and the sensitivity of the proposed approach in different conditions of observation, the RST methodology has been used to analyze the July 2007 and October 2008 floods occurred in the South Africa and Algeria regions.