MODIS NRT Flood Water Mapping

Fritz Policelli, NASA GSFCLANCE UWG

November 16, 2010

Collaborators and Partners

• NASA Applied Sciences Program– Brad Doorn – Program Manager

• Dartmouth Flood Observatory– Robert Brakenridge – Director

• NASA GSFC– Shahid Habib - NASA– Daniel Slayback – SSAI/ GSFC– Jen Sun – SSAI/ GSFC– Dimitar Ouzounov - SSAI/ GSFC

• NASA LANCE MODIS team

• Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD, Nairobi Kenya)

• CEOS/GEO Haiti Flood Pilot Project (Stuart Frye et al.)

• International Red Cross and Red Crescent

• Namibia Hydrology Dept.

• NASA GSFC Sensor Web Team

Motivation(100 Million)

Background

• Dartmouth Flood Observatory– Creating Flood Maps using satellite data since 1993– MODIS Flood Maps since operations began in 2000– Recently moved to University of Colorado

• http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/

• To date the flood maps have been manually processed:– Now streamlined to approx. 1 hour operation (after flood is detected, data is acquired,

staff are available…..)

Background Layer: SRTM Topography

MODIS ImagesTerra Aqua

March 24, 2009

March 25, 2009

Tile h20 v10Okavango Delta – Lake Kariba

Composite Surface Water Mapfrom MODIS Bands 1 and 2

Reference water overlay: MOD44WRemaining red = potentially flooded areas

Persistent Cloud Cover from MOD35 Indicate Areas Where Flood Detection is Not Possible

Annotations for published product

VALIDATION – Early Results

Known Issues

1. Cloud Cover/ Cloud Shadow

2. Dense Vegetation

3. MODIS 250m resolution will not meet all users needs

Evaluation Provided by Namibia Hydrology

NEXT STEPS – Near Term

• Complete (limited) Validation

• Project Final Report – Jan. 31, 2011

• Maintain Flood Map Service for Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti

• Serve data in additional formats (geotiff, KML, flooded area shape file..)

• Evaluate accuracy and utility of flood maps with partners

• Investigate (with GSFC Sensor Web team) automated triggering of hi-resolution satellite data acquisitions based on Flood Map

• Proposal with LANCE team to expand Flood Map Service to Global

NEXT STEPS – Mid Term

• Produce/ Evaluate 1-day composites (Currently 2-day composites)

• Update Flood Maps each orbital Pass (Currently once per day)

• Investigate integrated use of Digital Elevation Data to define flooded areas(to address low lying areas under dense vegetation)

• Investigate (with Intl partners) incorporation of near real time radar imaging data

Vision for the Future

FLOOD MODEL FORECASTSNRT FLOOD MAPPING SENSOR WEB TASKING

GROUND DATA, REPORTS, PHOTOS Angola March 4, 2009

“Heavy rains have been reported for the past 3 weeks to the southern Provinces of Angola. …..4719 houses are reported destroyed and 4719 families displaced. Large amount of farmland and crops are flooded and lost in particular. No death to humans reported but large amount of small animals have been lost. There remains a major risk for epidemic disease outbreak due to lack of safe drinking water and to latrines.”

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

Some ConclusionsLimited Automated Flood Mapping SystemLive since late October 2010

Products are now availablethrough the Dartmouth Flood Observatoryhttp://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/LanceModis.html

We are Looking for More Partners to HelpEvaluate

We are Looking for funding to expand and improve

QUESTIONS?

COMMENTS?

• MODIS Cloud Mask Product = MOD35• Surface Water Map and Cloud Mask Created

Using ENVI/ IDL• Overlay Mapping Uses ArcGIS 10, Python

Scripting