SECOORA Webinar: Rapid Floodwater Mapping and Depth Analysis Using Optical UAV and SAR Technology

SECOORA’s August installment of the Coastal Observing in Your Community Webinar Series featured Dr. Leila Hashemi-Beni, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T). She provided an overview of rapid floodwater mapping and depth analysis using optical UAV and SAR technology.

Dr. Hashemi-Beni’s presentation will discuss harnessing geospatial data science and remote sensing data fusion for flood mapping. The need for fast processing and classification of massive remote sensing datasets for near real-time monitoring of floods and other rapidly changing events makes a compelling argument for integrating deep learning methods into sensing approaches to create fast and accurate flood maps. These maps can provide crucial information for delineating flood-affected areas, assessing damage (e.g., roads, bridges, infrastructures), and feeding models that predict the vulnerability of inland and coastal areas to flooding.

Dr. Leila Hashemi-Beni is an associate professor of Remote Sensing and GIS at the Dept. of Built Environment at College of Science and Technology, NC A&T State University. She’s the director of NCAT’s DEAP Institute of Geospatial Data Science and Remote Sensing for Environmental Management funded by NASA. She works as a PI/Co-PI on many projects supported by NASA, NSF, NOAA, Microsoft, North Carolina Collaboratory, North Carolina DoT. She is the Co-Chair of LiDAR, Laser Altimetry and Sensor Integration Working Group, International Society of Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing (ISPRS).