Effectiveness of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 for flood detection assessment in Europe

Inundation is one of the major natural hazards in Europe. The evaluation of the flood hazard and risk is not straightforward mainly due to the monitoring system that is poor or not uniformly distributed in the territory. The ESA Earth Observation Program, including a series of satellites, Sentinels, for the operative observation of the natural phenomenon, e.g. the inundations, can potentially reduce the gap. Sentinel-1 (SAR: synthetic aperture radar) and Sentinel-2 (optical) have been demonstrated to be suitable for mapping flooded areas, but despite the medium-high spatial and temporal resolution of the sensors, the mapping of inundated territories is often partial or missing. The objective of this study is to evaluate through a synthetic study the effectiveness of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 in the systematic assessment of floods in Europe, where the flood events have durations ranging from some hours to a few days. To reach the target, we analysed 10 years of river discharge data over almost 2000 sites in Europe, and we extracted flood events over some established thresholds as proxies of riverine inundations. Based on the revisit time of the satellite constellations and cloud coverage, we derived the percentage of potential inundation events that Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 could be able to observe. Results show that assuming the configuration of a constellation of two satellites for each mission and considering the ascending and descending orbit, on average 58 % of flood events are potentially observable by Sentinel-1 and only 28 % by Sentinel-2 due to the cloud coverage.

Automated summary

Inundation is a major natural hazard in Europe, but flood hazard and risk evaluation is complicated due to poor or unevenly distributed monitoring systems. The ESA Earth Observation Program's satellites, including Sentinels, have the potential to bridge this gap, but current mapping of flooded areas using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 is often incomplete. This study evaluates the effectiveness of these satellites in systematically assessing floods in Europe, and finds that while Sentinel-1 can potentially observe 58% of flood events, Sentinel-2 is limited by cloud coverage and can only observe 28% of events.