This tutorial describes a method for monitoring floods using SCP and the freely available images acquired by MODIS and Sentinel-2.
Several services provide global monitoring of floods. For instance, the near real-time Global Flood Mapping provided by the NASA Goddard’s Office of Applied Science. This services apply a water detection algorithm to MODIS images, as described at this link . You can find an example of produced map here .
Of course, the educational purpose of this tutorial is to monitor flooded areas in a semi-automatic way, exploiting the characteristics of satellite images that can be downloaded with SCP. In particular, MODIS Products allow for the daily monitoring of floods, and the other satellite images (Landsat, Sentinel-2, and ASTER) have higher spatial resolution allowing for more local studies.
In this tutorial we are going to study the severe flooding occurred in the Ganges in August 2016, caused by monsoon rains. For more details, please read this informative page by NASA Earth Observatory.
