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Main Authors: Aravamudan, Akshay, Rasheed, Zimeena, Zhang, Xi, Scarpignato, Kira E., Nikolopoulos, Efthymios I., Krajewski, Witold F., Anagnostopoulos, Georgios C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10601
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author Aravamudan, Akshay
Rasheed, Zimeena
Zhang, Xi
Scarpignato, Kira E.
Nikolopoulos, Efthymios I.
Krajewski, Witold F.
Anagnostopoulos, Georgios C.
author_facet Aravamudan, Akshay
Rasheed, Zimeena
Zhang, Xi
Scarpignato, Kira E.
Nikolopoulos, Efthymios I.
Krajewski, Witold F.
Anagnostopoulos, Georgios C.
contents The frequency of extreme flood events is increasing throughout the world. Daily, high-resolution (30m) Flood Inundation Maps (FIM) observed from space play a key role in informing mitigation and preparedness efforts to counter these extreme events. However, the temporal frequency of publicly available high-resolution FIMs, e.g., from Landsat, is at the order of two weeks thus limiting the effective monitoring of flood inundation dynamics. Conversely, global, low-resolution (~300m) Water Fraction Maps (WFM) are publicly available from NOAA VIIRS daily. Motivated by the recent successes of deep learning methods for single image super-resolution, we explore the effectiveness and limitations of similar data-driven approaches to downscaling low-resolution WFMs to high-resolution FIMs. To overcome the scarcity of high-resolution FIMs, we train our models with high-quality synthetic data obtained through physics-based simulations. We evaluate our models on real-world data from flood events in the state of Iowa. The study indicates that data-driven approaches exhibit superior reconstruction accuracy over non-data-driven alternatives and that the use of synthetic data is a viable proxy for training purposes. Additionally, we show that our trained models can exhibit superior zero-shot performance when transferred to regions with hydroclimatological similarity to the U.S. Midwest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_10601
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data-driven Super-Resolution of Flood Inundation Maps using Synthetic Simulations
Aravamudan, Akshay
Rasheed, Zimeena
Zhang, Xi
Scarpignato, Kira E.
Nikolopoulos, Efthymios I.
Krajewski, Witold F.
Anagnostopoulos, Georgios C.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
I.4.9
The frequency of extreme flood events is increasing throughout the world. Daily, high-resolution (30m) Flood Inundation Maps (FIM) observed from space play a key role in informing mitigation and preparedness efforts to counter these extreme events. However, the temporal frequency of publicly available high-resolution FIMs, e.g., from Landsat, is at the order of two weeks thus limiting the effective monitoring of flood inundation dynamics. Conversely, global, low-resolution (~300m) Water Fraction Maps (WFM) are publicly available from NOAA VIIRS daily. Motivated by the recent successes of deep learning methods for single image super-resolution, we explore the effectiveness and limitations of similar data-driven approaches to downscaling low-resolution WFMs to high-resolution FIMs. To overcome the scarcity of high-resolution FIMs, we train our models with high-quality synthetic data obtained through physics-based simulations. We evaluate our models on real-world data from flood events in the state of Iowa. The study indicates that data-driven approaches exhibit superior reconstruction accuracy over non-data-driven alternatives and that the use of synthetic data is a viable proxy for training purposes. Additionally, we show that our trained models can exhibit superior zero-shot performance when transferred to regions with hydroclimatological similarity to the U.S. Midwest.
title Data-driven Super-Resolution of Flood Inundation Maps using Synthetic Simulations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
I.4.9
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10601