EGU25-11828, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11828
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Satellite Mapping Analysis of the November 2023 Flood in Prato, Tuscany
Beatrice Carlini1, Luca Baldini1, Elisa Adirosi1, Giovanni Serafino2, Giovanni Scognamiglio2, and Roberta Paranunzio1
Beatrice Carlini et al.
  • 1National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC), Italy (b.carlini@isac.cnr.it)
  • 2M.B.I. S.r.l, 56121 Pisa, Italy

Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, leading to greater risks for vulnerable urban areas. Inadequate infrastructure often exacerbates vulnerability of many areas, resulting in significant socioeconomic losses from climate-related hazards and in particular flooding. Satellite services, smart technologies such as GIS-based Digital Twin help to simulate flooding scenarios to support urban planning and decision-making and provide monitoring and short-term forecasting of floods thus contributing to enhance climate resilience and to strengthen financial risk strategies.

To ensure that these systems operate effectively, the validation of their predicted  outputs in terms of flooding maps is crucial. This task is usually possibly carried out using the satellite-based data available and particularly those from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which are effective in various meteorological conditions. In urban areas, the application of state-of-the-art SAR-based methods for flood detection is challenging due to the complexity of effects caused by the radar backscattering from built environments.

This study focuses on validating flood maps for urbanized environments based on a consolidated approach that reprocesses the clustering result with fuzzy logic approach (Pulvirenti et al. 2023, DOI: 10.3390/w15071353) and here improved to better estimate flooding in urban areas. The method was applied to a severe precipitation event in November 2023 in Tuscany, Italy, which caused multiple flood episodes. Our focus was on the Florence-Prato-Pistoia plain, the most densely populated area in Tuscany. On November 2, heavy rainfall began in the early afternoon, accumulating 130-170 mm within 5-6 hours. This led to the first flood episodes after 19:00 local time, resulting in several casualties.

Copernicus Rapid Mapper was activated on 03/11/2023, 04:21 (Local time = UTC+1). It produced an estimate of flooded area mainly using one COSMO-SkyMed image, collected on November 6, after a second storm occurred in the night between 4 and 5 November. In our analysis we used two images. For the common image, good spatial correspondence was obtained. However, due to the late availability of satellite images, critical early floods were missing.

This work takes this case study to address the opportunity and challenges of flood detection in urban areas using satellite data. While highlighting the importance of having a satellite flood mapping service, some drawbacks are also pointed out, such as the lack of revising time that can imply missing early stages of floods to early implement search and rescue operations. Projects to improve revisiting time are related to the emergence of next generation constellations, such the ASI/ESA IRIDE multisatellite and multiservice constellation. In case of fast evolving phenomena, such as the one considered in this study, a higher time resolution of flood mapping would increase the chance to obtain data even in the first floods. In practice, resorting to modelling and sensor data coupled in digital twins eventually integrated with obtained from citizens science will be still unavoidable. This is demonstrated within the SCORE project (https://score-eu-project.eu/), a four-year EU-funded project aiming to increase climate resilience in European coastal cities (Coastal City Living Labs - CCLLs).

How to cite: Carlini, B., Baldini, L., Adirosi, E., Serafino, G., Scognamiglio, G., and Paranunzio, R.: Satellite Mapping Analysis of the November 2023 Flood in Prato, Tuscany, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-11828, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11828, 2025.