CNES-Funded Flood Risk at Scale

Mission Brief

In mountaineous areas, the destructive nature of floods is often tightly linked to the amplitude of induced erosion and sediment transport. Quantifying fluvial dynamics during large discharge events is therefore crucial for flood hazard assessment and landscape dynamics.

Satellite imagery, such as Pléiades (Neo) and CO3D, provides unprecedented time series of high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) before and after floods. These datasets offer critical insights into the morphological signatures of fluvial processes during and after floods, enhancing our ability to understand and anticipate flood-induced hazards.

This project leverages my recently published hydrological simulation approaches to 1) develop a numerical framework for running hydrodynamic simulations on DEMs derived from CNES imagery, and 2) measure morphological metrics relevant to predict river erosion and sedimentation. I will apply this framework to Digital Surface Model (DSM) time series capturing flood events following the Kaikoura Earthquake, and other events characterized by substantial flood-induced morphological changes after initial extreme sediment pulses.

The framework will demonstrate its ability to identify topographic areas susceptible to damage, enhancing our understanding of fluvial dynamics during floods and the role of pre-existing topography in conditioning these dynamics at local to regional scales.