River Level Measurement Using COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation Data: A Case Study

The problem of not having persistent river levels monitoring via satellite remote sensing is of considerable importance as it affects the safety of neighboring inhabited areas. It has been shown that Synthetic Aperture Radar interferometry is a valid tool to measure the water surface of the river. Unfortunately, rivers can swell dynamically in less time than between two observations with interferometric configuration. In this paper we propose an improvement of the previous research’s algorithms that solves the above problem by means of a reduction of revisit-time by a factor of 2 in the worst case, giving a better response time to provide alarms in case of emergency. Finally, experimental results are consistent with the water level measurements from the in situ stations.