Kuro Siwo: 33 billion m 2 under the water. A global multi-temporal satellite dataset for rapid flood mapping

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Global flash floods, exacerbated by climate change, pose severe threats to humanlife, infrastructure, and the environment. Recent catastrophic events in Pakistan andNew Zealand underscore the urgent need for precise flood mapping to guide restoration efforts, understand vulnerabilities, and prepare for future occurrences. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing offers day-and-night, all-weatherimaging capabilities, its application in deep learning for flood segmentation is limited by the lack of large annotated datasets. To address this, we introduce KuroSiwo, a manually annotated multi-temporal dataset, spanning 43 flood events globally. Our dataset maps more than 338 billion m 2 of land, with 33 billion designatedas either flooded areas or permanent water bodies.