Planetary Scale Monitoring of Urban Growth in High Flood Risk Areas

Climate change is increasing the incidence of flooding. Many areas in the developing world are experiencing strong population growth but lack adequate urban planning. This represents a significant humanitarian risk. We explore the use of high-cadence satellite imagery provided by Planet, whose flock of over one hundred ’Dove’ satellites image the entire earth’s landmass everyday at 3-5m resolution. We use a deep learning-based computer vision approach to measure flood-related humanitarian risk in 5 cities in Africa.