Ph: ESA

The SaferPlaces platform and its application during the recent floods that hit the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in May 2023 are the topics of the latest news from the European Space Agency (ESA), on the section “Observing the Earth”.

The ESA’s InCubed SaferPlaces platform was used by Emilia-Romagna Civil Protection to generate flood water and depth maps, to take crucial decisions after the disaster and support the assessment of the damages of the affected areas. Specifically, the platform utilizes satellite, climate data and AI-based models combined into a cloud computing environment to provide insights into areas prone to floods across the globe. SaferPlaces’ AI-based algorithms were used to process terrain data and information on the flooded areas obtained by merging in situ data with multiple satellite sources including: Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2CosmoSky-MedPlanet and SPOT.

The article shows few maps that have been produced with the SaferPlaces platform, portraying the extent of the flooded areas in some of the most affected municipalities, including Faenza that is reported in the image above. The left side of the image shows the water depth (m) over Faenza from the 17 May 2023, extrapolated by processing satellite data and Digital Elevation Models (DEM) with the SaferPlaces platform. The right side shows the estimated economic losses in Euro for residential buildings, computed by exploiting the SaferPlaces damage model and using the water depth maps as input.

Read the full article HERE