Identification of Flood Hazard Areas - gap analysis

P24: Identification of flood hazard areas

Download the gap analysis product sheet 

Maturity score

Mean: 2.7

STD: 0.61

Constraints and limitations

·  False positives from the changes on the land surface, not caused by flooding.

·  Difficulties in detecting floods in urban or densely vegetated areas.

·  False positives caused by differences in relative orbits of Sentinel-1

·  Complex in areas of local hydrology

·  Limitations in detecting water under vegetation,

·  Discrimination of "Artificial flooding" from irrigated fields (E.g. rice paddy fields).

Relevant user needs

UN12: Analysis of potential risks in specific regions.

UN13: Need to geo-map clients.

UN14: Need to screen the feasibility of projects against different hazard criteria.

UN37: Projection of risk to portfolio assets into the future.

UN43: Need to monitor changing precipitation patterns and flood risk in the vicinity of vulnerable assets.

R&D gaps

·  Limitations of revisit time-frequency (potentially missing flood events or max flood peak)

·  Unavailability of global high-resolution DEM

Potential improvements drivers

·  More revisit time of SAR data.

·  Additional data on vulnerability and exposure is required to evaluate the impacts of some perils/hazards.

·  Global high-resolution DEM.

Utilisation level review

Utilisation score

Mean: 3.13

STD: 0.60

No utilisation

Low utilisation

Medium utilisation

·  The product is already satisfying the technical and usability requirements.

·  Lack of a single database, costs, and the need may not be as crucial in some sectors like the asset management space (different story for insurance, and re-insurance companies which need this product)

·  Efforts to use this EO product more are ongoing in academic literature. Higher utilisation is blocked because of a lack of data to combine with this EO product - e.g., the boundary locations of assets, buildings, and other properties.

High utilisation

Critical gaps related to relevant user needs

Guideline gap

UN37: Projection of risk to portfolio assets into the future.