Levee protected area detection for improved flood risk assessment in global hydrology models

Precise flood risk assessment is needed to reduce human societies vulnerability as climate change increases hazard risk and exposure related to floods. Levees are built to protect people and goods from flood, which alters river hydrology, but are still not accounted for by global hydrological model. Detecting and integrating levee structures to global hydrological simulations is thus expected to enable more precise flood simulation and risk assessment, with important consequences for flood risk mitigation. In this work, we propose a new formulation to the problem of identifying levee structures: instead of detecting levees themselves, we focus on segmenting the region of the floodplain they protect. This formulation allows to better identify protected areas, to leverage the structure of hydrological data, and to simplify the integration of levee information to global hydrological models.