Mapping Floods in Urban Areas From Dual-Polarization InSAR Coherence Data

Previous studies have shown that the decrease of temporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) coherence could be exploited to detect the appearance of floodwater in urban areas. However, as of today, approaches based on this principle only make use of single co-polarization images for identifying the presence of floodwater in the double-bounce feature. In this study, we take advantage of both co- and cross-polarization images to detect significant decreases of the multitemporal InSAR coherence in order to enhance the mapping of floodwater in urban areas. We consider that not only double-bounce scattering, but also multiple-bounce may occur in urban areas depending on how the building facades are oriented with respect to the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor's line of sight. The Sentinel-1 (S-1) mission is particularly well suited for applying and testing this kind of approach due to the systematic availability of dual-polarization data. Using as a test case, the widespread flooding in the city of Houston, USA, caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, we demonstrate that the proposed methodology leads to an increase of the accuracy of the urban flood maps from 75.2% when only using the VV polarization, to 82.9% when using the dual polarization information.

Automated summary

This study utilizes both co- and cross-polarization images to enhance the mapping of urban floodwater by detecting significant decreases in multitemporal InSAR coherence. It is suggested that both double-bounce scattering and multiple-bounce may occur in urban areas, impacting the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach. The proposed methodology demonstrates an increase in the accuracy of urban flood maps by utilizing dual polarization information, particularly with the use of Sentinel-1 mission data.