Monitoring Weather-Related Hazards Using the HydroSAR Service - Application to the 2020 South Asia Monsoon Season.

This paper describes the concepts and recent activities of the HydroSAR project, a collaborative effort between the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the NASA Goddard and Marshall Space Flight Centers, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, focused on the automatic production of SAR-derived information for weather-related hazards. This paper will introduce the main processing algorithms as well as the broad product portfolio of the HydroSAR project, which includes information on surface water extent and surface water depth, in addition to capturing agriculture activity and other event-related changes. We will also highlight the cloud-based implementation of HydroSAR, which enables the system to generate data quickly and over large spatial scales. To demonstrate the performance of the service, we present results from a recent event response, where HydroSAR was used to support mapping activities related to the 2020 South Asia monsoon floods, inundating at least 25% of Bangladesh and large areas of the Bihar Province, India. In-region partner ICIMOD supported the performance assessment of the delivered products and algorithms.