Cosmo SkyMed in support of flood monitoring

In this paper, the exploitation of Earth Observation (EO) data in the operational chains for flood monitoring and postevent damage assessment is addressed, focusing to the specific task of flood mapping. The very-high-resolution (VHR) multitemporal observation capability offered by the current sensors, and in particular by Cosmo-SkyMed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellation, is exploited. Two image processing algorithms based on data fusion and segmentation, merged with a preliminary non-linear filtering, are presented for flood maps generation. Both approaches help to locate flooded areas from a pair of SAR images acquired before and after the event. The work is framed in the context of a project funded by the Italian Space Agency1. Experiments are performed on Cosmo-SkyMed images acquired in Stripmap configuration, related to different datasets acquired all over the world.