Understanding flood risk from space: opportunities to adapt to changing risk
Abstract
Floods affect more people than any other hazard and the frequency and magnitude of exposure is growing with land use, population, and climatic changes. Building new social and financial support to limit the impact of floods on sustainable development is essential to mitigate poverty traps and meet Sustainable Development Goals. Satellite data records past flood events and can be used for near real time monitoring to improve response, recovery, and adaptation. Advances in cloud computing, machine learning, and the commercial satellite industry enable increasingly accurate flood event monitoring and history. This talk will review the science of satellite based flood mapping from local to global scales (including the Global Flood Database https://global-flood-database.cloudtostreet.ai/), and how it can be used to understand global changes in exposure, monitor events, measure the impact of flood adaptation interventions, and support new index insurance contracts to expand financial protection. I'll demonstrate results from NASA funded projects, with both existing and soon to be released open datasets from the Social Pixel Lab at the University of Arizona. We work with civic partners, from our own local Regional Flood Control District in Pima County to the national Flood Forecasting and Warning Center of Bangladesh, to help them understand how satellite data can improve their risk management and assess adaptation interventions. Beyond academia, the private sector is essential in scaling technology and science to enable decision making tools to tackle the size of the growing flood risk challenge. I'll show how a private sector initiative I co-founded, Cloud to Street, is commercializing satellite image analysis to provide professional services for more than 27 countries. I'll tell stories of how the Cloud to Street Flood Intelligence Platform supports relief and recovery for the World Food Program, is assessing forecast based financing initiatives, and is enabling index insurance around the World. Ultimately, developing and applying the science needed to mitigate the impacts of flood risk will require innovation and collaboration from academia to government to industry- the size of the problem needs all of us working together!
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H33E..01T