Integration of SAR intensity and coherence data to improve flood mapping

The latest generation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems allows providing emergency managers with near real time flood maps characterized by a very high spatial resolution. However, mapping inundations in vegetated and urban areas still represents a critical issue, because the radar signatures of these targets are often ambiguous. This paper proposes a possible strategy to cope with flood mapping using SAR data in vegetated and urban areas. In particular, the use of the interferometric coherence is proposed to complement the information brought by intensity. The SAR images used for verifying the potentiality of the joint use of intensity and coherence data are the COSMO-SkyMed observations of the flood that hit the Emilia region (Northern Italy) in January 2014