ICEYE Flood Insights

Flood response, insurance claims and lending often rely on modelled scenarios or ground surveys that arrive days after the peak. ICEYE Flood Insights provides observed flood data instead: the maximum extent and depth of a flood during and after an event, down to individual buildings.

The product is built on ICEYE's own constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, which image through cloud and darkness. An ICEYE meteorology team monitors forecast floods in ICEYE's priority countries and tasks the satellites; a full analysis is produced only where there is evidence of at least 100 buildings under 30 cm or more of water. The SAR observations are fused with terrain, river-gauge, social-media and other third-party data. ICEYE states that analyses arrive within hours of the flood peak and are updated daily. Deliverables are GIS-ready flood-depth GeoTIFF rasters and flood-extent GeoPackage vectors, plus building-impact layers in the United States and Japan. ICEYE aims for depth accuracy within 30 cm mean absolute error; its published sample data is typically 3–5 m per pixel.

Access is through the ICEYE Solutions Suite web app, its API, Esri ArcGIS Online, or partners such as Guidewire, Duck Creek, EigenRisk and Nearmap. Insurers can buy it with Flood Early Warning and Flood Rapid Impact as an annual Flood Solutions subscription. ICEYE reports over 400 observed flood events in more than 40 countries. Named users include insurer Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire (TMNF), whose group invests in ICEYE and which has a published claims case study, plus FEMA, Norway's water and energy directorate NVE, UK water utility Severn Trent, Transport for NSW and the South Carolina Emergency Management Division.