The EO4NOWCAST project aims to develop an AI model to predict flood risk based on Earth Observation. Nowadays, flood prediction is mainly based through complex physical models that have some limitations. For examples, most of them does not include estimation of soil moisture in the algorithms, while soil moisture is a crucial parameter to determine risk of flood. Indeed, the EO4NOWCAST project exploit Copernicus product, in particular Normalized DIfference Water Index (NDMI), to predict flood risk. However, the great limitation of EO resources is that the  information are available only when Sentinel satellites overcome the area of interest, indeed every 5-10 days. 

To overcome this limitation, EO4NOWCAST develops an AI model to update the most recent NDMI map from Copernicus through rainfall map obtained by in situ monitoring network. In this way, even if the last map of Copernicus has been produced some days ago, the model estimates the current level of soil moisture with high spatial resolution (around 100mx100m).

In this asset, you can find the dataset used to train the EO4NOWCAST AI model. Specifically, data samples used are:

• NDMI maps from Copernicus
• Cumulative rainfall maps coming from Italian in situ rainfall monitoring network (operated by ARPA)

The dataset covers the area of the Genoa basin in Italy from 2016 to 2022.