Dynamic monitoring and damage evaluation of flood in north-west Jilin with remote sensing

The greatest flood in the twentieth century hit north-east China in the summer of 1998. The movement of the flood over the Nenjiang River drainage area in the north-west of Jilin province was dynamically monitored using Radarsat data; with the landcover map at the scale of 1: 100 000, interpreted from Landsat TM images, the damages from the flood were also evaluated. In this paper, a technique, similar to MVC ( Maximum Value Composite) used to remove cloud contamination on NOAA AVHRR images, was applied to correct the logical errors on the flood boundaries extracted at different time. In addition the flood boundaries were vectorized via automatic tracing method, therefore the dynamic monitoring of the flood spatial process was performed better and the information of the changing inundated areas was offered more rapidly. The method produced in the study proved to be an effective approach to dynamic monitoring of flood.