A Comparison of High-Resolution Optical and SAR Flood Inundation Extent Maps in the USA’s Red River of the North

As the impacts of climate change become more frequent and intense, emergency management services require increased accuracy for monitoring flood impacts. Remote sensing offers the opportunity to address these concerns in a cost-effective manner; in particular, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors are often utilized to accomplish this as a result of their penetration of cloud cover and ability to image during both day and night. The Red River of the North, located in north central United States, is a region that faces annual flooding due to spring snowmelt conditions, and thus offers an ideal location for evaluation of flood product accuracy across different satellite-derived flood inundation extent maps. In this study, we offer a time series comparison of flood products derived from both high-resolution optical data and SAR images of the Red River region. The utilization of a new Self-Supervised Water Detection (SWD) method for flood mapping optical imagery shows promising results in validating SAR-derived flood inundation mapping (FIM).