Mapping the 2021 October Flood Event in the Subsiding Taiyuan Basin by Multitemporal SAR Data

Abstract

A flood event induced by heavy rainfall hit the Taiyuan basin in north China in early October of 2021. In this study, we map the flood event process using the multitemporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired by Sentinel-1. First, we develop a spatiotemporal filter based on low-rank tensor approximation (STF-LRTA) for removing the speckle noise in SAR images. Next, we employ the classic log-ratio change indicator and the minimum error threshold algorithm to characterize the flood using the filtered images. Finally, we relate the flood inundation to the land subsidence in the Taiyuan basin by jointly analyzing the multitemporal SAR change detection results and interferometric SAR (InSAR) time-series measurements (preflood). The validation experiments compare the proposed filter with the Refined-Lee filter, Gamma filter, and a statistically homogeneous pixels selection based multitemporal SAR filter. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed STF-LRTA method in SAR despeckling and detail preservation, and the applicability to change scenes. The joint analyses reveal that land subsidence might be an important contributor to the flood event, and the flood recession process linearly correlates with time and subsidence magnitude.

Keywords

• Flood mapping
• interferometric SAR (InSAR)
• land subsidence
• multitemporal change detection
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)