Flood monitoring and damage assessment in Thailand using multi-temporal HJ-1A/1B and MODIS images

Abstract

Flood is one of the most serious natural disasters in South Asia. How to monitor floods and assess damage caused is the most urgent problem for the government and disaster experts. With the advances of remote sensing, images acquired before the beginning of disaster to the very end or after the disaster from Earth-observing satellites benefit the decision making for reduction and protection of disaster dramatically. By using multi-temporal HJ-1A/1B and MODIS remote sensing data, applicability of different algorithms for flood monitoring and damage assessing was investigated in 2011 Thailand floods. Three different algorithms were adopted to monitor flood disaster events with water indices. Comparisons on the flood disaster monitoring and damage assessing by means of HJ-1A/1B and MODIS images suggested that multi-temporal HJ-1A/1B is much useful for the purpose, which demonstrated with the analysis of the thresholds estimated and problems in data post-processing. The variations of the inundated areas in the process of 2011 Thailand floods revealed were presented in this paper, and the damage caused by flooding was evaluated in three aspects, the population in the inundated region, the inundated information of different provinces and land use areas. Compared with MODIS, HJ-1A/1B images can provide more rapid and accurate flood extent and damage assessment for the disaster prevention, damage mitigation and disaster relief.