05 April 2009

News South Wales Flooding

On Monday March 30th 2009 Australian Bureau of Meteorology release a predition of minor to moderate flodding in the Orara, Bellinger and Nambucca River areas. By Wednesday April 1st the region was declared a natural disaster.

Apogee tasked TerraSAR-X to acquire high resolution radar imagery over flood affected areas. Radar is the only remote-sensing technique capable of imaging an area through clouds or at night. The data was acquired at 6:15am on April 3rd. The flood water analysis was conducted with a StripMap scene at 3m resolution and clearly shows the inundated areas.

The image below is part of one of the StripMap images over the north coast of NSW with the white rectangle outlining the subset shown in greater detail.

StripMap over NSW coast on the 3rd April.

The image below shows a Google Map of the subset (see overview above).

The image below shows the same subset with TerraSAR-X. Water bodies appear as black in SAR data, which makes flooded area visually easy to identify. These have been mapped in blue as an inundation layer.