Ten years of floods across Europe mapped from space with reconstructed water depths

Floods are among the most deadly and destructive natural disasters. Improving our understanding of large-scale flood dynamics is crucial to mitigating their dramatic consequences. Unfortunately, systematic observation-based datasets—especially featuring flood depths—have been lacking.

This contribution presents advancements in developing an unprecedented catalogue of satellite-derived flood maps across Europe from 2015 onwards. Results are based on the systematic identification of floods in the entire Sentinel-1 archive at 20 m spatial resolution as provided by the Global Flood Monitoring component of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. Using a novel algorithm that accounts for terrain topography, flood maps are enhanced and provided with water depth estimates—a critically important information for flood impact assessments.

The resulting dataset represents a significant step towards the creation of a global flood archive. It provides new tools for interpreting flood hazards on large scales, with substantial implications for flood risk reduction, urban development planning, and emergency response.