Use of Remote Sensing Flood Inundation Maps (FIM) for Evaluating Model-predicted FIM: Challenges and Strategies

Remote sensing (RS)-derived Flood Inundation Maps (RS-FIM) are, in principle, a desirable source of observed data for the development, calibration, and validation of (model) predicted FIM. Advantages of using RS-FIM for evaluating predicted FIM include its spatial continuity (compared to point observations), and the representation of real flooding events (compared to synthetic events (e.g. 100-yr) or other models). Disadvantages may include low/mismatched spatial resolution, insufficient classification accuracy, lack of water depth information, and gaps in coverage (due to dense vegetation, buildings, clouds, etc.). Gaps in inundation coverage are very common in RS-FIM. While these may not be a major issue for some RS-FIM applications, they are a major, yet unacknowledged, issue for fair and robust evaluation of predicted FIM. This is because the evaluated model may correctly predict flooding in these gaps while the (RS-FIM) benchmark data is classified as non-flooded (leading to inaccurate identification of 'False-positives'). Techniques for 'closing the gaps' in RS-FIM using hydraulic models or terrain analysis can yield improved FIM but, depending on the scale of the 'gap-filling', can result in an RS-model hybrid which undermines the observational nature of RS-FIM. Here we will demonstrate and discuss the challenges in using RS-FIM for the evaluation of predicted FIM and present tools and analysis demonstrating a new framework for fair and robust evaluation of FIM predictions using RS-FIM.