Mapping of Flood Areas Using Landsat with Google Earth Engine Cloud Platform

Using Google Earth Engine and Landsat, this team created a rapid and robust tool for mapping historical flood inundation areas. This enhances existing efforts towards flood mitigation, monitoring, and management.

Landsat 5, 7, and 8 were used to map historical flood inundation areas. Google Earth Engine (GEE) was used to implement the Flood Mapping Algorithm (FMA) to process Landsat data from 1984-2021. FMA relies on developing a “data cube”, which is spatially overlapped pixels of Landsat imagery captured over a period of time. The data cube is used to identify temporary and permanent water bodies using the Modified Normalized Difference Water Index, NDVI, site-specific elevation, and land use data.

Observations from FMA in GEE can be used as a rapid and robust hindsight tool for mapping flood inundation areas, training AI models, and enhancing existing efforts towards flood mitigation, monitoring, and management.

Read the research here: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/7/866