Mapping of Flood-Inundated Urban Regions Using Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery for the 2018 and 2019 Kerala Floods

Abstract

Floods are a common natural calamity causing an immense impact on the natural and human ecosystems around the world. A combination of unfavorable meteorological, hydrological, and physical conditions causes it. The study area is the Vembanad Lake System in Kerala, India comprising six watersheds: Periyar, Muvattupuzha, Meenachil, Manimala, Pamba, and Achenkovil that drains into the lake. The state faced severe flooding in 2018 and 2019 due to torrential rainfall. Thus, this study focuses on assessing flood inundation mapping utilizing Sentinel-1 SAR imagery in Google Earth Engine (GEE) for 2018 and 2019 since it simplifies and streamlines the complicated and time-consuming pre-processing of Sentinel-1 SAR images. These images are pre-processed, and the flooded areas are delineated. Change detection by image ratio method is utilized to identify the flood inundated and the most frequently flooded areas. The results show that 4% and 3.21% of the entire region were flooded in 2018 and 2019, respectively. In addition, 14.7 Km2 of the urban area flooded in 2018, whereas 7.26 Km2 of urban land flooded in the 2019 floods. Hence, these inundation maps can be utilized for risk assessment and primary preventive measures. It also serves as a tool to warn the residents in that region about the hazards and the possibility of inundations at the time of heavy downpours in the future. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.