RESCUE_SAT project: Leveraging Satellite Data to Improve Large‑Scale Flood Modeling

The RESCUE_SAT project was launched as part of the “Innovation for Downstream Preparation for Science” (I4DP_SCIENCE) programme (Agreement no. 2025‑2‑HB.0), funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), with the goal of enhancing the performance of the RESCUE model through the integration of satellite data. RESCUE is a large‑scale inundation model that enables probabilistic flood‑hazard assessment over large areas by preserving computational efficiency while explicitly representing hydrologic-hydraulic processes along the full drainage network. Primarily based on digital terrain models (DTMs), RESCUE is a hybrid framework that combines a geomorphology-based representation of the river network with simplified hydrological and hydraulic formulations to estimate water levels and inundation extents. The central challenge of the RESCUE_SAT project is to deliver a flood‑modelling tool capable of providing a more reliable and detailed representation of both large‑scale hydrological behavior and local hydraulic processes, including flow interactions with structures such as levees, bridges and dams which are currently not explicitly represented in RESCUE. To this purpose, the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery acquired by the ASI’s COSMO-SkyMed constellation is processed using interferometric techniques to derive high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs), reaching meter-scale resolution. Starting from high-resolution DEMs derived from COSMO-SkyMed satellite imagery, RESCUE_SAT enables the identification of the locations of structures that interacts with flow propagation, supporting their systematic mapping. Once the infrastructures have been identified and parameterized from the high-resolution DEM, the DEM is resampled and processed to a computationally advantageous coarser resolution, while the detected infrastructure elements are directly integrated into the hydrological–hydraulic model.