12 March 2018
Devastating flooding once again took place in the North Queensland region. The Bureau of Meteorology had issued major flood warnings for quite a few river catchments, including:
- Herbert River
- Murray River
- Tully River
- Johnstone River
- Russell River
- Mulgrave River
Among the regional cities and towns affected, Ingham has suffered the most damage as reported in the main news media:
💧Herbert River update:
.@BOM_Qld says major flood levels are slowly easing at #Ingham Pump Station and downstream to #Halifax but are expected to remain high and above the major flood levels throughout the weekend. https://t.co/l5agAs9153
📷: Calan Rainaudo pic.twitter.com/Kqf3PNCKXO— ABC Emergency (@ABCemergency) March 10, 2018
This blog summarises three levels of information products we have developed for this event. As related content has been posted and shared on social media in response to the evolving disastrous event, we make links here for the convenience of readers who wish to follow the event from multiple perspectives and learn what we are creating. (Now with the developed cloud-based geospatial big data and analytics platform, we aim to routinely produce similar information products for future major / extreme events in Australia and around the world.)
Level 1: Earth Observation & Imagery Analysis
Satellite and aerial imagery immediately before, during and soon after the event is actively sought. Currently, main sources include the 10m-resolution Sentinel-2 and 15m-resolution Landsat-8 satellite imagery. We have developed advanced, automated and unique image processing workflows to present the imagery and extract relevant thematic information of interest.
First satellite view of the major flooding in #Ingham (North Queensland, Australia), captured by the new Sentinel-2 imagery on Saturday 10 March 2018 (local time 11:27am)#sentinel2 @CopernicusEMS @CopernicusEU @QldFES @ABCemergency @abcbrisbane pic.twitter.com/DNwtAun0Y4
— BigData Earth (@BigDataEarth) March 11, 2018
Level 2: Integrated Location Profile Report
The report contains metrics on the environment, property location and hazard risk, including elevation, slope, surface water flow directions, vegetation, climate, population and property. Such readily-produced metrics and insights are important for applications in emergency, insurance, etc. when making informed location decisions. We have recently enhanced the location profile report (v4.1, 2018) by including a wide range of methods that allow us to examine the spatial and temporal dimensions of underlying exposure (e.g. building stocks, infrastructure assets and sum insured). At this stage, we are able to produce PDF reports (~40 pages) for each location in Australia and reports (~12 pages) for any location elsewhere.
Exposure summary for #Ingham:
– Based on 02/2018 Open G-NAF, the area is dominated by residential addresses in the main city & agricultural addresses in the vicinity; very limited commercial & industrial exposure.
– Population changes 2006-2016@QldFES @ABCemergency @abcbrisbane pic.twitter.com/BtECvYJTTm— BigData Earth (@BigDataEarth) March 11, 2018
Level 3: Hazard-specific Animation and Simulation
To better reveal the dynamic nature of many hazardous events, map-based animation has been a very effective communication tool. For flood events, we produce two types of simulations for investigating flood-prone areas: (1) by changing elevation, and (2) by modelled water depth. More information on this can be found here.
1 – Flood-prone areas in #Ingham, #QLD
Major #flood Warning for the #Herbert River @BOM_Qldhttps://t.co/xC0fY8Q9Cw@QldFES @ABCemergency @abcbrisbane pic.twitter.com/jE89r1cb8i— BigData Earth (@BigDataEarth) March 11, 2018