26 February 2009

News South Wales Flooding

On the 18th of February 09, heavy rainfall has impacted the Hunter Valley and the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales causing extensive flooding.

Apogee tasked TerraSAR-X to acquire high resolution radar imagery over flood affected areas of the mid-north coast of NSW. Radar is the only remote-sensing technique capable of imaging an area through clouds or at night. The data was acquired on February 19th, 24 hours after the heavy rainfall. The flood water analysis was conducted with a ScanSAR scene at 16m resolution and clearly shows the inundated areas.

The image below is part of one of the ScanSAR images over the mid-north coast of NSW with the white rectangles outlining the two subsets shown in greater detail.

ScanSAR over NSW coast on the 19 February.

The image below shows a Google Map of the subset 2 (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 turquoise as an inundation layer.

Subset 1