Community Satellite Processing Package

  CSPP VIIRS Flood Detection Software Version 1.1 Release

14 November 2018

New release of the NOAA VIIRS I-Band resolution Flood Detection Software in support of NOAA-20 and S-NPP satellites developed by Sanmei Li and Donglian Sun at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. This CSPP release (CSPP_FLOOD_1_1) provides VIIRS Flood Detection Software 1.1, adapted and tested for operation in a real-time direct broadcast environment. The software contains binary executable files and supporting static data files, as well as input and output files for verification of a successful installation.

The CSPP VIIRS Flood Detection software is designed for global automatic flood detection using Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 VIIRS Sensor Data Record (SDR) inputs, as well as the S-NPP VIIRS Cloud Mask Environmental Data Record (EDR) if it is available. The software can be successfully executed under the following conditions:
  • Day time datasets. The software will process all data within a pass where the Solar Zenith Angle is less than 85 degrees.
  • Datasets with maximum latitude less than 85°N/85°S and an average latitude of the aggregated granules less than 75°N/75°S.
  • When using an Area of Interest (AOI) file, the subset boundaries fall within the overpass data coverage.
What is New in CSPP Flood Version 1.1?
  • Added support for VIIRS on the NOAA-20 satellite.
  • Retrievals over ocean waters no longer include clouds. Therefore, the GeoTIFF images will not display clouds over ocean waters.
  • Improved cloud shadow detection.
  • Improved detection of mixed water/ice phase regions.
  • Improved cloud/snow cover/water surface classifications.
Output Products

The output product is one HDF4 file per pass that contains a Short Integer array named “WaterDetection” for each reprojected 375 m image element. The “WaterDetection” values correspond to the following categories:
  • 1: No valid data
  • 15: Water surface without water fraction retrieval
  • 16: Bare land
  • 17: Vegetation
  • 20: Snow or ice
  • 27: River ice
  • 30: Cloud
  • 88: Supra-snow/ice water or Mixed ice and water or Melting Ice
  • 150: Cloud Shadow
  • 199: Normal Open Water
  • 200-300: Floodwater Fraction
In addition, a script is included that can create a color enhanced 8 bit GeoTIFF from an output Flood Detection HDF4 file.

System Requirements

The system requirements for the CSPP_FLOOD Version 1.1 software have not changed from the Version 1.0 requirements:
  • Intel or AMD CPU with 64-bit instruction support,
  • 8 GB RAM,
  • CentOS-6 64-bit Linux (or other compatible 64-bit Linux distribution),
  • 15 GB of disk space (plus space for your own DB data and CSPP_FLOOD products).

The software, installation guide and test data are available at the CSPP Download site.


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