Tag Archives: Hurricane Harvey

Remote Sensing Shows the Extent of Flooding from Hurricane Harvey and Other Large Flooding Events

Peter Lobner

Dartmouth Flood Observatory, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, integrates international satellite data to develop a worldwide view of surface water issues, and can provide regional maps that show the extent of flooding in areas of interest. Data from many satellite sources are used, including NASA’s MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) and Landsat, European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel 1, ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) Cosmos-SkyMed, and Canadian Space Agency’s Radarsat 2.

The Dartmouth Flood Observatory homepage is here:

http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu

The world view of large flooding events as of 26 August 2017 is shown in the graphic.

Source: Dartmouth Flood Observatory

The following 31 August 2017 maps show the areas in Texas and Louisiana that were flooded by Hurricane Harvey also known as DFO flood event 4510). Red represents flooded areas, blue represents normal water extent, and dark grey represents urban areas.

Area mapSource: Dartmouth Flood Observatory

Here’s the link to these detailed flooding maps for Hurricane Harvey:

http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/Events/2017USA4510/2017USA4510.html

This webpage also provides links to other information sources related to Hurricane Harvey.

The Dartmouth Flood Observatory maintains an archive of large flood events from 1985 to present. This archive is accessible online at the following link:

http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/Archives/index.html

Dartmouth Flood Observatory is a member of the Global Flood Partnership (GFP), which describes itself as, “a cooperation framework between scientific organizations and flood disaster managers worldwide to develop flood observational and modeling infrastructure, leveraging on existing initiatives for better predicting and managing flood disaster impacts and flood risk globally.” For more information on the Global Flood Partnership, visit their homepage and portal at the following links:

https://gfp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/about-us

http://portal.gdacs.org/Global-Flood-Partnership