Global Satellite Revisit Periods for Flood Detection, 2016-2020

Two datasets evaluate flood detectability by combining Landsat, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1 data. The first provides global median revisit periods on a 0.5-degree grid from 2016 to 2020, while the second calculates average revisit times for 5,130 flood records from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory. Dinuke Munasinghe of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory produced these datasets for a manuscript in review.

Use Cases

• Optimizing satellite tasking for flood monitoring based on composite revisit period calculations.
• Assessing the improvement in flood observation frequency from a multi-sensor ensemble.
• Analyzing the spatial availability of satellite imagery for hydrological events based on a global grid.
• Benchmarking satellite constellation performance for disaster response applications.

Strengths

• Global coverage from 82.5°N to 55°S, excluding Antarctica.
• Analysis period spans 1,827 days from January 2016 to December 2020.
• Includes data for 5,130 specific flood events from an established database.
• Calculates revisit times for individual satellites and their combined ensemble.

Limitations

• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Dinuke Munasinghe

Collection Method

Calculated from satellite orbital data and intersections with a 0.5-degree grid using ArcMap 10.8.1.

Time Range

2016-01-01 to 2020-12-31

Geography

Global land area (82.5°N to 55°S)