Flood mapping after Cyclone Eloise
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| Where | Beira and the Zambezi region, Mozambique |
| When | 2021 |
| For | Internal Resilience BV project, to support future flood preparedness |
| Data & tools | Sentinel-1 SAR, Google Earth Engine |
| My role | Flood mapping and analysis |
Cyclone Eloise made landfall near Beira in January 2021, less than two years after Cyclone Idai hit the same area. During and right after a cyclone, optical satellite images are mostly white with cloud. Radar looks through that, so this was a job for Sentinel-1.
I used the Sentinel-1 archive in Google Earth Engine to map the flood extent over the Beira and Zambezi region, image by image. That gave two results: which areas flooded, and in which order. The second one is the more useful for preparedness. If you know which places go under water first, you know where to warn first.
Related: Saterra Labs at Resilience BV
Authors
Geospatial analyst: satellite monitoring, change detection and machine learning