Rapid response for flood detection implementing the RST approach on MSG/SEVIRI data

Floods are one of the most catastrophic natural disasters around the globe, impacting human lives and infrastructures. Mainly because of climate change, floods will occur with increasingly frequency and intensity in the future, threatening many regions of the world. In such context, a system able to give early and frequently updated information about the areas involved by floods is crucial to manage flood risk in the crisis and post-crisis emergency phases. In this paper the potential of a general and automatic methodology, named Robust Satellite Techniques (RST), has been tested when implemented on Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI) daytime data, to have a satellite reliable tool for a rapid detection of flooded areas. In this paper results achieved applying such an approach to study the Berg river flood, occurred in the South Africa Cape Town region in July 2007, are shown and discussed.