Flood Damage Assessment (FDA)

Flood Damage Assessment (FDA) is Synspective's service for evaluating flood damage during disaster response. After a flood, insurers, financial institutions, ministries and local governments need early information on where water has spread and what it has reached, but optical satellites, aircraft and drones are limited by cloud and darkness. FDA uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, which observes in all weather, day and night, to map the inundated area and estimate inundation depth, then applies AI and machine-learning methods to identify the roads and buildings affected.

Synspective's published FDA analyses of the 2019 Abukuma River flood, the 2021 Rokkaku River flood in Saga Prefecture and the 2022 Pakistan floods used Copernicus Sentinel-1 data; the company also names its own StriX small-SAR constellation and other SAR satellites as inputs. The analysis is automated. Results appear in a web-based dashboard that shows flooded buildings and roads in 3D by depth class, quantifies flooded area, flooded road length and the number of flooded buildings, and exports PDF reports. For the Abukuma River flood, FDA estimated 25.72 km² flooded at the time of imaging.

Synspective launched FDA in December 2020 as a subscription SaaS, and it was one of four finalists in the UR2020-SSTL x World Bank HADR Challenge. A joint demonstration with JAXA, Saga Prefecture and Shimauchi Engineer, using local flood records from 2019 and 2021, improved the analysis algorithm's accuracy, particularly in agricultural areas.