Application of Fengyun-4 Satellite to Flood Disaster Monitoring through a Rapid Multi-Temporal Synthesis Approach

Fengyun-4A (FY-4A) belongs to the second generation of geostationary meteorological satellite series in China. Its observations with high frequency and resolution provide a better data basis for monitoring of extreme weather such as sudden flood disasters. In this study, the flood disasters occurred in Bangladesh, India, and some other areas of South Asia in August 2018 were investigated by using a rapid multi-temporal synthesis approach for the first time for removal of thick clouds in FY-4A images. The maximum between-class variance algorithm (OTSU; developed by Otsu in 2007) and linear spectral unmixing methods are used to extract the water area of flood disasters. The accuracy verification shows that the water area of flood disasters extracted from FY-4A is highly correlated with that from the high-resolution satellite datasets Gaofen-1 (GF-1) and Sentinel-1A, with the square correlation coefficient R² reaching 0.9966. The average extraction accuracy of FY-4A is over 90%. With the rapid multi-temporal synthesis approach used in flood disaster monitoring with FY-4A satellite data, advantages of the wide coverage, fast acquisition, and strong timeliness with geostationary meteorological satellites are effectively combined. Through the synthesis of multi-temporal images of the flood water body, the influence of clouds is effectively eliminated, which is of great significance for the real-time flood monitoring. This also provides an important service guarantee for the disaster prevention and reduction as well as economic and social development in China and the Asia–Pacific region.