File:Recent Ohio River Flooding Detected by Satellites (NESDIS 2021-03-12 VIIRS 30m floodwater-depth Mar06 2021 zoomin).png

English: On March 6, the River Flood product---which combines imagery from the VIIRS instrument onboard both of the JPSS satellites along with the ABI instrument on NOAA’s GOES East---showed flooding along the Ohio River on the Kentucky/Illinois/Indiana border. At 10 a.m. EST that day, Louisville authorities measured the river’s crest at 60 feet at McAlpine Dam’s lower gauge—tying a record high set in 2019. The event still fell short of the all-time flooding record set in 1937. Significant flooding also occurred in nearby Evansville. Researchers at George Mason University, led by Sanmei Li, used a water-fraction product that could better determine the extent of flooding in that area using the high resolution channels (375m) on VIIRS. Recent improvements to this algorithm have allowed them to generate 30-meter (m) flood maps from the imagery from VIIRS over the continental United States, such as the map generated below.