Remote Sensing of Floods and Flood-Prone Areas: An Overview

River floods and coastal storm surges affect the lives of more people than most other weather-related disasters. Floods can destroy homes, roads, and bridges; tear out trees; cause mudslides; and take many human lives. During flooding, timely and detailed situation reports are required by disaster management authorities to locate and identify affected areas and to implement damage mitigation. Remote sensing systems on satellites and aircraft can provide much of the required information for delineating the flood-affected areas, assessing the damage, and feeding models that can predict the vulnerability to flooding of inland and coastal areas. In this article, I provide an overview of remote sensing and modeling techniques for forecasting the vulnerability to flooding of an area, determining the extent and intensity of the flooding, and assessing the damage caused by the flood.