Detecting floods in near-real-time

HASARD is a service for the detection of floods in near-real-time developed in the framework of the European Space Agency – ESA Research and Service Support.

The HASARD flood mapping software is integrated within ESA’s Research and Service Support processing platform and allows to select an area of interest and time range and, consequently, compare the flood image acquired during the flood event and a non-flood image acquired before/after the flood through Sentinel-1 based Synthetic Aperture Radar. The process, through the related algorithm, will return a map indicating the areas affected by the flood.

HASARD is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) and the ESA RSS team: the former provided the algorithm and the software, while the latter provided the pre-processing, the integration of the software into the Grid Processing on Demand – G-POD platform and the visualization of the results through the map.

The ESA Research and Service Support is a service operated by Progressive Systems since 2006 to support researchers, service developers and institutions in exploiting Earth Observation data. RSS provides the Earth Observation community with data provisioning, access and processing in order to benefit from the high amount of resources made available through the European Space Agency.

Figure 1: example of HASARD output products.
Flood vector in KML format for a rapid visualization in Google Earth.