INTRODUCTION
Goals
The GFM service is designed to achieve the following three major requirements, namely:
- to provide a continuous global, systematic monitoring of flood events,
- to significantly enhance the timeliness of flood maps for emergency response and
- to improve the effectiveness of Rapid Mapping activation requests through a better identification of the area of interest.
Additionally, the system is also designed to provide a long-term global flood monitoring archive. Making it ideal to provide essential information to plan for future events, such as flood protection measures or calibrate hydrological models. Finally, by combining data from the GFM service with other Copernicus Services, such as the Climate Service, the system will deliver useful information to address the challenges of climate change response management.
The aim of the proposed technical solution is the provisioning of an automated, global, satellite-based flood monitoring product enabling a continuous global, systematic monitoring of flood events complementing the existing CEMS components for flood early warning and on-demand mapping. The solution is based on all-weather, day-and-night SAR data provided by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites. It will provide a continuous, NRT global monitoring of all major flood events by the systematic, automated delineation of flooded areas and waterbodies and will therefore
- enable a continuous global, systematic monitoring of flood events,
- enhance the timeliness of flood maps for emergency response due to its fully automated process, and
- improve the effectiveness of Rapid Mapping activation requests through a better identification of the area of interest.
The GFM service includes the establishment and operational implementation of all facilities and processes for:
- Downloading worldwide Sentinel-1 Level 1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) imagery.
- Pre-processing of the Sentinel-1 data and storing the resulting georeferenced image stacks.
- Operational NRT application of high quality, fully automated flood mapping algorithms on a global scale.
- Generation of the required global flood monitoring output layers including observed flood events, observed water extent, reference water mask, exclusion mask, and uncertainty values.
- Data access and dissemination of the NRT flood monitoring product including an adequate user support.
- Performing regular quality assurance including product timeliness and accuracy and service reliability and accessibility.
- Building up a long-term archive for the analysis of past flood events
Partnership
GFM is run by the GLOBAL FLOOD MONITORING ALLIANCE, consisting of
- 2 companies: the EODC (Group Leader) and GeoVille
- 3 research institutions: the TU Wien, LIST and CIMA Foundation
- the German Aerospace Center DLR
comprises truly the most experienced group of leading experts in Europe for satellite based flood monitoring systems with a unique CLMS, CEMS and global flood mapping service heritage. From the early days of satellite based flood mapping and monitoring applications, the individual members of this group have built unprecedented, yet thematically complementary flood mapping, monitoring and related disaster risk service capacities as well as a accumulated a long track record of high-quality implementations and successful projects, related processing and data access systems with applications globally
