ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Remote Sens.
Sec. Remote Sensing Time Series Analysis
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsen.2025.1639845
Assessing Antecedent Climatic and Hydrological Conditions and Anthropogenic Impacts to Drive Catastrophic Flooding in the Northeastern United States
Provisionally accepted
- University of Virginia Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Charlottesville, United States
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The northeastern US has been experiencing catastrophic flooding in recent years. The flash floodingFlooding in the region is occurring more frequently and with higher intensity, causing substantial economic losses. The flooding in the region may be caused by changes in climatic and hydrological drivers such as extreme precipitation, rapid snowmelt, and saturated soil moisture conditions, along with impacts from human-driven interventions like changes in land cover and urban imperviousness. It is equally important to assess antecedent ground conditions prior to the active monsoon period to determine whether a particular variable has the potential to cause flooding in the region. Therefore, Tthis study analyzes the abovementioned variables to indicate flood risk and understand whether they contribute to flooding in the Northeastern US region. This study utilized various remote sensing satellite products for analyzing variables to fulfil the study's objectives, wherever possible, such as Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) maximum snow cover extent, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture, Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission (IMERG) precipitation, North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS) land cover, and National Land Cover Database (NLCD) urban imperviousness. The region experienced wetter antecedent soil moisture conditions (> 0.5 m3/m3) during spring due to rapid snowmelt (seasonal decline of ~97%) in all the periods considered in the study. Moreover, the summer precipitation fed excess water (~50-60 mm more rainfall than the decadal average) into already wetter ground conditions, overwhelming the region's overall hydrology and water balance and ultimately causing significant flooding. In addition, ~1838 sq. km. of croplands and ~1363 sq. km. of forests transitioned into built-up areas in a decade, increasing impervious surface and further exacerbating flooding risk in the region.During the summer of 2021 and 2023, the region received higher-than-average precipitation that mainly caused flooding.
Keywords: flooding, Northeastern US, remote sensing, Hydrological drivers, anthropogenic impacts
Received: 02 Jun 2025; Accepted: 17 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Aryal and Lakshmi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aashutosh Aryal, qeg4ne@virginia.edu
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