Flood Mapping of Amphan Disaster Using SENTINEL-1 IMAGES

Abstract

The thematic and disaster response maps prepared after the SAR analysis can aid the government, non-government, and business-specific needs in crucial decision making. It has been shown to be a quick and cost-effective way to provide a quick first-hand reaction to a disaster occurrence in locations where topography is unknown. We performed flood extent mapping in some parts of the worst-affected districts of West Bengal after the Amphan cyclone using SAR images with the cloud platform Google Earth engine. A real-time approach for identifying flood water based on automatic categorization and generating flood extent maps to access the damage is designed using the K-Means clustering algorithm on the sentinel-1 images. The clustering results for East Medinipur district revealed a clear estimate of 52,037 hectares of geographically flooded region. Flooding has affected 18,002 individuals, destroying 9,575 hectares of crops and 1,931 hectares of urban areas as a result of the cyclonic floods. In this work, an attempt has been made to use SAR satellites to detect floods and flood-affected areas in real-time.