Flooding extent mapping for synthetic aperture radar time series using river gauge observations

Abstract

The flooding extent area in a river valley is related to river gauge observations such as discharge and water elevations. The higher the water elevations, or discharge, the larger the flooding area. Flooding extent maps are often derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images using thresholding methods. The thresholding methods vary in complexity and number of required parameters. We proposed a simple thresholding method that takes advantage of the correlation between the river gauge and the flooding area. To show the applicability of the method, we used a 2014-2018 time series of 161 Sentinel 1 SAR images acquired over a wetland floodplain located in Northeast Poland. We validated the method by extracting local water line elevations from a high-resolution digital elevation model for three river gauges, which resulted in a root-mean-square error of 0.16 m, a bias of 0.07 m, and a correlation of 0.86 for the best scenario. The scenario analysis showed that the most important factor affecting the method's accuracy was a proper delineation of the zone in which the flooding extent area was calculated. This was because other water sources, uncorrelated with river flow, were present in the floodplain as open water. Additionally, higher accuracy was obtained for the VV than VH polarization. The discharge can be used instead of water elevations as a river gauge variable, but this results in more bias in the water extent estimates.