Zhouyayan Li, Ibrahim Demir

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides 10-m weather-independent global Earth surface observations for various tasks such as land cover land use mapping, water body delineation, and vegetation change monitoring. However, the application of SAR imagery has been limited to retrospective tasks by a “first event then observation” rule. Recent studies have proven the feasibility of a one-shot forecast of backscatters of SAR imagery using meteorological driving forces, soil moisture, geomorphic factors, and previous SAR images collected for the target area. Although the approach is promising, spatial connectivity, more specifically, the influence of the status of surrounding areas on the target location has yet to be considered. To fill that gap, this study proposed two nowcasting frameworks that can integrate precipitation and soil moisture data collected from surrounding areas through spatial aggregation (SA) and by processing spatial series (SS), respectively. The catastrophic 2019 Central US Flooding was used as a case study with the goal of predicting backscatters of SAR imagery captured during the event. The results from SA, SS, and a framework that only considers localized input (S0) are compared against each other as well as with the benchmark performance created with persistence assumption. Results show that S0, SA, and SS outperform the benchmark. In addition, considering data from neighboring areas that contribute to the target location further improves prediction accuracy. Comparing the gradients of results considering/not considering additional data indicates that neighboring data can alter the model’s attention on each feature of the localized input matrix. The difference in gradients between SA and SS indicates the way the neighboring information is integrated also matters. The methodology proposed by this study can serve as a building block for more active usage of SAR imagery in forward-looking tasks such as early flood warning and response.