Use of SAR data for detecting floodwater in urban and agricultural areas: The role of the interferometric coherence

The use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is presently well established in operational services for flood management. Nevertheless, detecting inundated vegetation and urban areas still represents a critical issue, because the radar signatures of these targets are often ambiguous. This paper analyzes the role of the interferometric coherence in complementing intensity SAR data for mapping floods in agricultural and urban environments. The advantages of the joint use of intensity and coherence are first discussed in a theoretical way and then verified on a case study, namely, the flood that hit the Emilia-Romagna region (Northern Italy) in January 2014. The short revisit time of the COSMO-SkyMed images, as well as a dedicated acquisition plan tailored to the requirements of the Italian Civil Protection Department, has allowed us to build a data set of radar interferometric observations of the event. Results show that the analysis of the multitemporal trend of the coherence is useful for the interpretation of SAR data since it enables a considerable reduction of classification errors that could be committed considering intensity data only. Interferometric data have permitted us to distinguish zones where water receded from areas where it persisted for a longer time and, in one case, to measure changes of water level.