The Flood Observatory maintains a Global Active Archive of large flood events, 1985 to present. It is available to the public in both spreadsheet and GIS formats (both formats together provide the complete Archive). New events are entered into this archive each week. As of the end of 2016, there were 4432 events; each has a unique archive number.
According to the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters, April 12, 2017, "Torrential rain has caused flooding in southern Argentina, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. The rain started at the end of March and has caused the Dulce and Chico Rivers to overflow, affecting cities in the area. One city which has particularly been affected is Comodoro Rivadavia. Estimates suggest that 80% of the city has been destroyed by floods and mudslides after the city received more than a year of rain in less than a week. Bridges and roads in the city were destroyed or disrupted and much of the city is flooded with mud and water. A yellow alert is also in place for the Río Hondo reservoir, located in northern Argentina, which is overflowing". This is Activation #525 for the Charter. The above flood maps are for flooding in northern Argentina, Santiago del Estero Province; DFO Event 4462 provides mapping for flooding in southern Argentina (also included in the Charter activation).
For a web map service version, visit this DFO link and, zoom in to location of interest, and turn on appropriate data layers.
NASA Landsat 8 and ESA Sentinel SAR data if used in this map were obtained from the the U.S. Geological Survey Hazards Data Distribution System. and the Sentinels Science Data hub, respectively. Landsat 8 is jointly managed by NASA and the United States Geological Survey. Flood modeling results if used are from the NASA/University of Maryland Global Flood Monitoring System (GFMS), Drs. Robert Adler and Huan Wu, University of Maryland/ESSIC.
Event-specific water extent files supporting this Flood Event Map are located here. These may include high spatial resolution mapping such as from Sentinel or Landsat, or lower resolution files from MODIS. Draft versions may be posted and later revised; such revisions will include in the file names "r1", "r2", etc. The older files remain in this folder but generally should not be used. Both MapInfo and Shp formats are provided.
Click here for access to the automated daily MODIS-derived .shp file GIS record (record commences in 2011).
Data from the Global Surface Water Explorer (a download data link is provided) is included as part the (dark blue) surface water layer. It is based on Landsat data at a spatial resolution of 30 m (Jean-Francois Pekel, Andrew Cottam, Noel Gorelick, Alan S. Belward, High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature 540, 418-422, 2016). On the map, it is shown together with the NASA Shuttle Water Boundary Data (SWBD) surface water extent (90 m resolution) processed from the 11-day February, 2000, SRTM mission and corrected using Landsat data. Large flood events are not normally depicted in either data set. Thus, red areas on our maps show flood extent beyond these more typical water extents.
When used, NASA NRT Global Flood Mapping maximum water extent for the years 2013-2015, at 250 m spatial resolution, provide part of the (dark blue) maximum flood mapped. DFO creates these annual water extent layers from data provided by that project, by accumulating into one annual file all of the daily .shp files for each year. DFO has also produced flood extent files through mapping of individual floods (~ yr 2000 to present); these are also included where available in this maximum flood extent layer.
(counting since April 19, 2017)