SATELLITE ESTIMATION OF FLOODED AREA AND RIVER WATER LEVEL DYNAMICS
IGARSS 2014 & 35TH Canadian Symposium on Remote sensing – Energy and our changing planet- Québec, Canada- July 13-18, 2014.
International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2014 IEEE, vol., no., pp.4351,4354, 13-18 July 2014 – doi: 10.1109/IGARSS.2014.6947453
Abstract: Flooding is a major concern in the Plata Basin. In particular, Paraná River has a long and wide floodplain, which has been settled and cultivated. Losses due to floods in Argentina during the 1983, 1992, 1998, 2007 and 2009-2010 floodings exceeded US$1 billion each. Therefore, providing information about the current state of the basin hydrologic condition in a systematic way is critical to the regional economies and society. In particular, it is of extreme importance to monitoring basin floodplain wetlands flood-drought cycles. These ecosystems extend along the Paraná-Paraguay axis and have highly dynamic exchanges of water with the river, presenting important annual and interannual variations. In this context, both floodplain water level and flooded area become relevant proxies for the total volume of water inside the floodplain. Morover, the dynamics of these variables will be a raw indicator of floodplain overall hydrological behaviour. Therefore, estimating these variables in a systematic way using remote sensing data, it is possible to constrain the outputs of hydrological forecast models. In this paper, a methodology to retrieve flooded area and water level in herbaceous wetlands, based on active/passive microwave data and an emission model [1],[2],[3],[4] is presented. We compare our results with microwave altimetry data [5], and analyzed floodplain behaviour during flooding and “unflooding” phases by studying the relationship between fraction of flooded area (ff) vs floodplain water level (WL)