Software spots leaks in flood defences

The tool, known as the LHIDRAMANNING, has been designed to integrate information about the rate at which flood water flows overland with aerial images from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors.

Currently, flood-risk maps are created using numerical models of swell waves that simulate potential scenarios in river basins. However, these models have a number of flaws, including poor satellite resolution and an inability to model small land features.

Mark Todd, coastal flood management advisor for the Environment Agency, said: ’Some parts of Europe still rely on satellite imagery to build flood-risk models. But with these you can’t really pick up the certain details, such as crop types in the land.

’The system developed at UPM will identify flood risks more quickly and effectively than satellite imagery, particularly in areas where there are dramatic changes in land over small spaces.’ The technology uses large-format photogrammetic cameras that generate a panchromatic PAN), multi-spectral image, with a spatial resolution of less than 20cm and a radiometric resolution of 12 bits per channel.