Spatially distributed water stages from remotelysensed imagery

The potential of remote sensing for disastermonitoring is well known and numerous efforts arecurrently made towards more timely image acquisition.Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites seemparticularly useful for flood monitoring. To date,SAR flood imagery is mostly used to map flood areaand extent. On only rare occasions, otherflood-related variables are derived to aid floodmanagement. Therefore, it is the aim of this work toderive water stages from a single date flood imagethat are accurate enough for adequate integrationwith flood inundation models. During a first stage, aSAR image of a flood has been used to develop aremote sensing-based flood model that accounts formost data uncertainties, adapts to localised flowbehaviour and estimates spatially distributed waterstages accurately enough for integration withhydrodynamic models. During a second stage,uncertainties associated with the SAR derived waterstages are estimated, which is much in line with thecurrent philosophy in hydrological modelling.Perspectives on how to use these data to support oreven improve flood inundation modelling ishighlighted in the last chapter.