[2606.07780] Land cover and flood type govern the detection limits of satellite-based flood mapping across diverse global flood events
[Submitted on 5 Jun 2026]
Title:Land cover and flood type govern the detection limits of satellite-based flood mapping across diverse global flood events
View a PDF of the paper titled Land cover and flood type govern the detection limits of satellite-based flood mapping across diverse global flood events, by Venkatesh Kolluru and 8 other authors
View PDF
Abstract:Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards, and their increasing frequency under climate change makes satellite-based inundation mapping essential for disaster response. Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite archives offer geographic transferability, but their operational reliability across diverse, unseen events remains uncharacterized. Here we deploy Prithvi-EO-2.0 across 19 out-of-distribution flood events (2017-2025) spanning six continents, eight climate zones, and six flood mechanisms, validating against two independent reference products. Detection accuracy depended jointly on land cover and flood type, with cropland yielding the highest agreement (IoU=52%) and riverine events the strongest detection (F1=0.69), while tree cover and built-up areas showed near-zero detection (IoU=4%) regardless of flood mechanism. Dual-reference validation revealed that apparent model error partly reflects definitional inconsistency between reference products rather than detection failure. Iterative pipeline testing identified 23 failure modes, with pipeline engineering dominating initial error over model capacity. These findings establish environment-dependent detection boundaries for operational satellite flood mapping.
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.07780 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2606.07780v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.07780
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Venkatesh Kolluru Dr [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 18:46:03 UTC (7,964 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled Land cover and flood type govern the detection limits of satellite-based flood mapping across diverse global flood events, by Venkatesh Kolluru and 8 other authors
View PDF
view license
Current browse context:
cs.AI
new | recent | 2026-06
Change to browse by:
cs cs.CV cs.LG
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)