Extending Dynamic World Surface Water Mapping to Sentinel-1 with AlphaEarth Embeddings

Rapid flood mapping is critical for emergency response, yet optical imagery is often unusable during major flooding and single-temporal SAR is ambiguous, since new inundation, permanent water, and other smooth surfaces produce similar backscatter. This study evaluates whether stable land-context priors can improve post-event SAR flood segmentation when a registered, seasonally matched pre-event acquisition is unavailable. Using the CONUS (Continental United States) subset of ImpactMesh-Flood, we compare four backbones spanning distinct pretraining regimes-a from-scratch CNN UNet, an ImageNet-pretrained UNet, the SAR-pretrained TerraMind Vision Transformer, and the optical-satellite-pretrained DINOv3 Vision Transformer-in SAR-only, SAR+DEM, and SAR+AlphaEarth configurations under an identical fusion design, training protocol, and event-stratified split. Models are selected on a validation flood event and evaluated separately on two held-out events, Hurricane Florence and the Louisiana floods, with three-seed reporting for auxiliary configurations. Both auxiliary priors improve over the observed SAR-only baselines across all backbones and test events. AlphaEarth exceeds DEM on the harder Florence event for every backbone and achieves the best Florence IoU, while DEM is competitive on Louisiana and produces the best result there. The seed analysis reveals a trade-off: DEM is more stable across initializations, whereas AlphaEarth offers higher peak performance and higher recall on the harder event. Cross-event differences track flood-class prevalence and similarity to the training distribution, underscoring the need for per-event evaluation. We reframe single-temporal SAR flood segmentation as an alignment between radar observations and stable land-surface priors, where learned and physical context offer complementary pathways to more reliable rapid flood mapping.

Managing water resources in mountainous regions depends heavily on reliable Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) and Snow Height (HS) data, yet these variables remain difficult to track at scale. This study evaluates three machine learning architectures (XGBoost, U-Net and SegFormer) for the joint estimation of SWE and HS variations from Sentinel-1 InSAR data over the Italian Alps, using the IT-SNOW reanalysis as reference. SegFormer achieves the best results on both targets, with an MAE of 10.391 cm for HS and 27.113 mm w.e. for SWE and the lowest variability across initializations. A feature sensitivity analysis shows that including all available features does not guarantee the lowest error, with model- and task-specific sensitivities. Spatial metrics (R2, Pearson's r) separate the three architectures far more clearly than mean error (MAE, RMSE) does, and decomposing the error per window attributes most of it to a systematic offset in the estimated mean variation rather than to the spatial pattern.

Reliable high-resolution flood extent mapping from satellite imagery remains constrained by limited data fidelity and sensor-specific artifacts. Multispectral optical imagery is degraded by clouds, shadows, and urban confounders, while synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is affected by speckle noise and sensor co-registration uncertainty. This work presents an integrated flood mapping framework that jointly addresses these limitations through curated datasets and novel learning strategies. We introduce a new Sentinel-2 (S2) and Sentinel-1 (S1) dataset covering the contiguous United States, featuring pixel-accurate 10 m water masks with emphasis on challenging weather conditions and urban environments that are underrepresented in existing benchmarks. High-quality S2 annotations are manually produced using rigorous geospatial labeling protocols and transferred to SAR imagery through weakly labeled temporally coincident acquisitions. To address SAR-specific artifacts, a shift-invariant loss function is employed to tolerate residual geolocation uncertainty between SAR imagery and optical-derived labels, and a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) is trained on multitemporal SAR composites to suppress speckle while preserving flood-relevant spatial structure. Experiments using UNet and UNet++ architectures demonstrate strong multispectral performance (AUPRC up to 0.956) and statistically significant improvements in SAR flood mapping when using shift-invariant loss and CVAE-based despeckling compared to classical filters. These results underscore the importance of dataset fidelity, misalignment-robust training, and demonstrate the viability of generative despeckling for operational flood mapping.