Data from earth observation satellites could deliver more timely warnings flood warnings to Australians, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO).

A project being carried out by the CSIRO in collaboration with the Vienna University of Technology, and funded by the European Space Agency, will see observations from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) on the Envisat satellite used to increase the reliability of information that is fed into models for monitoring and forecasting floods.

Currently, the system relies on optical data combined with passive microwave information and digital elevation models to identify volumes of water.
 But the CSIRO is developing a system to monitor and forecast the progression of floods for better water management.

To increase the accuracy and reliability of the system, and to compensate for the limited resolution of passive microwave data along with the fact that optical instruments are not able to see through clouds, information derived from ASAR is being incorporated into the system.

ASAR data can be used to continuously monitor how much water is stored in the soil, as well as observing inundated areas during a flood because its radar can penetrate through clouds and rain.

Albert van Dijk from the CSIRO said the system will provide many advantages.

"In Australia we have learned to live with droughts and floods. Extreme floods cause terrible damage, but in other cases floods are vital for our river wetlands and irrigation communities. ESA's radar observations are helping us develop ways to monitor and predict the progression of floods,” he said.

The European Space Agency plans to launch a Sentinel-1 satellite in 2013 that will greatly improve operational forecasting. Sentinel-1 is one of the five missions being built specifically for Europe's Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme.