2016 Baton Rouge Flooding

The map on this page estimates flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana as a result of storms in August 2016. The darker blue shows flood inundation on Aug. 14, 2016, compared to locations that typically have water (shown in lighter blue). Mapped flood extent is likely an underestimate due to cloud cover in the satellite imagery. The background image is from May 2016.

Methods

Flood inundation extent is based on a comparison of surface water present in images from May 6th, 2016 and August 14th, 2016, the latter near the peak of flooding in Baton Rouge. While the August image has significant cloud cover obscuring the surface, East Baton Rouge is mostly clear. To determine surface water in both images, we used a Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) based on the near infrared (band 8) and green (band 3) bands on images from the European Space Agency's Sentinel 2A satellite. This analysis should be considered a minimum estimate because of areas obscured by clouds.

Who We Are

This map was made by staff in the Natural Hazards Research and Mitigation Group at UC Davis (Prof. N. Pinter), in association with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. The map was made by Nick Santos, with consultation from Nicholas Pinter, Quinn Hart, and Rui Hui.