Tropical Cyclone Idai hits Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi

The Tropical Cyclone Idai is regarded as one of the worst tropical cyclones on record to affect Africa and the Southern Hemisphere as a whole. The storm caused catastrophic damage in multiple nations, leaving so far more than 600 people dead and hundreds more missing. Idai brought strong winds and caused severe flooding in Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. On March 15, Idai had made landfall near Beira, Mozambique. Catastrophic damage occurred in and around Beira in southern Mozambique. A major humanitarian crisis unfolded in the wake of the cyclone, with hundreds of thousands of people in urgent need of assistance across Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

In the frame of the International Charter Space and Major Disasters, DLR/ZKI supports the crisis management activities and provides TerraSAR-X data. In addition, various flood layers are generated by DLR's automated flood processors (Vectorfiles for download below).

A further product (P03 and P08), shows the flooded areas of Beira derived from Sentinel-1 radar imagery. The flooded areas are divided into three flood classes, depending on the built-up density of the flooded areas. The flood classes are based on a change detection analysis exploiting radar intensity and interferometric coherence generated from five images acquired before and one image during the event on March 20, 2019. As the method is part of ongoing development, the results should be regarded as experimental.

Another product, P06, illustrates the total flood duration in days along the Rio Pùngué between March 15, 2019 and March 25, 2019. The flood duration is based on flood masks extracted from sixteen Sentinel-1 images acquired between 7 March, 2019 and 25 March, 2019 and two TerraSAR-X images acquired on March 23, 2019 and March 24, 2019.

All in all it is tried to support and round the existing services (continuative Links on the right side).