Use of Sentinel-1 imagery for flood management in a reservoir-regulated river basin

Abstract

Flood hazard monitoring and mapping is of great importance because it represents a significant contribution to risk management. The present study investigated the flood event that occurred downstream from the transboundary Strymon River basin, more specifically at Serres basin–a reservoir-regulated basin, in the beginning of 2015. The focus of this study was to better understand the spatio-temporal dynamic of the flood and the causes that initiated the hazard. Within the Serres basin, the Strymon transboundary river outflows to Lake Kerkini, which regulates water flow downstream for irrigation purposes and flood protection. For this research, a dataset of Sentinel-1 SAR GRD images was collected and processed covering the period of October 2014‒October 2015 to investigate the water level changes in Lake Kerkini. Based on SAR images, binary water/non-water products and multitemporal RGB amplitude images were generated and interpreted. Sentinel-1 products have proved to be an effective tool on flood hazard dynamic extension mapping and estimation of water extent bodies retained by small reservoirs. In agreement with hydro-meteorological data and the high-resolution DEM, it was conceived that the flood event occurred due to the water volume flowing from upstream in the reservoir and the large amount of water draining from the tributaries into nearby sub-basins. Moreover, inefficient water management of the overwhelming water flow through the dam could further strengthen the flood event. The proposed approach, which is entirely based on open access remotely sensed data and processing tools, could be implemented in the same area for past flood events to produce archive retrospective data, as well as in other similar reservoir-regulated river basins in terms of water management and flood risk management.

Keywords

flood mapping / Sentinel-1 / SAR / binary images / multitemporal image / river basin

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Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank the Lake Kerkini Management Authority, National Cadastre and Mapping Agency of Greece, and Serres basin Agricultural Cooperative. Authors would like to acknowledge the Interbalkan Environment Center for providing data in the framework of the River Alert project. Finally, the authors would like to thank the ESA Research and Service Support (RSS) team for supporting our processing work by providing a high performance Virtual Machine.

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