SFFA and GFA: Flood Aftermath Imagery from Social Media and Street Views, 2018-2024

The San Francisco Flood Aftermath (SFFA) dataset is a challenging query set of social media imagery from 2018 to 2024, featuring adverse conditions like nighttime and heavy rain. The Global Flood Aftermath (GFA) dataset contains 1,283 samples for training and validation, annotated with multi-axis severity labels. Author Zihua Zhu published this 1.7 GB collection on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license, last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking image localization models against noisy, uncurated citizen data based on the SFFA query set.
• Training models for fine-grained flood impact estimation based on the annotated severity labels in the GFA dataset.
• Testing model robustness to visual degradations like water glare and occlusions based on the described adverse capture conditions.
• Analyzing hydrological diversity across global regions based on the dataset's coverage of high-income regions, emerging economies, and the Global South.

Strengths

• The GFA dataset contains 1,283 samples with an explicit 85:15 training-validation split.
• Data spans a temporal range from 2018 to 2024, providing several years of coverage.
• Imagery is systematically enriched with challenging conditions like nighttime scenes, heavy rain, and complex visual disturbances.
• Annotation follows a strict hierarchical taxonomy with multi-axis severity labels grounded in a visual cue repository.

Limitations

• Row count for the primary SFFA dataset is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic and source bias inherent to its collection from social media and specific regions.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Zihua Zhu.

Collection Method

SFFA imagery was systematically crawled from social media streams; GFA dataset was curated.

Time Range

2018 to 2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-23 09:04:55; freshness should be verified.

Geography

San Francisco for SFFA; global coverage for GFA, including coastal China, the U.S., and equatorial monsoon regions.