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June 24, 2008
Purdue professors produce maps of Indiana flooding areas
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University faculty and students have created maps of central and southern Indiana flooding that can be use to provide damage analysis and assess the flood's impact.The flooding in central and southwestern Indiana earlier this month was the worst since 1913, said Jie Shan, an associate professor of geomatics engineering in the School of Civil Engineering. By June 19, 37 Indiana counties were declared federal disaster areas.
"The flood maps provide important information about the flood extent and distribution," Shan said. "By displaying the maps together with high-resolution aerial images in Google Earth, you are able to identify the nature of the flooding and damage. These maps can be used for damage estimation, flood modeling, water quality studies, urban planning, infrastructure sustainability, and all other aspects of disaster management and mitigation."
The flood maps were produced by using Landsat satellite images as the primary data source. The images were taken June 11 and 12 and made available courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. Shan said object-based image classification techniques were used to extract the water areas from the imagery.
The flooding areas are shown in red on the maps. Basic geographic formation, including topographic elevation, county and city maps, road networks, and rivers, are overlaid for reference. The water depth data on June 11 were taken from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
For comparison, the water areas in June 2007 included on the maps are in green. Shan said the flood maps project is ongoing and will be periodically updated.
Writer: Clyde Hughes, (765) 494-2073, jchughes@purdue.edu
Source: Jie Shan, (765) 494-2168, jshan@purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
Note to Journalists: The flood maps can be viewed and downloaded at https://engineering.purdue.edu/CE/floodmaps. A small Google Earth plug-in, available at the Web site, will need to be installed to view the online version. Please use Internet Explorer to browse the online maps. The downloadable versions are prepared in three resolutions, all in pdf format.
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