Measuring Stormwater Overflow with Synthetic Aperture Radar

Many municipalities in the United States have begun to use impermeability measurements to incentivize storm water retention as part of the architectural and landscaping design process. These measurements are performed through analysis of high-resolution aerial photography and updated on an annual or semi-annual basis. The practice of using high resolution aerial or even satellite photography is prohibitively expensive to deploy on a global scale. Wolverine Radar Company was founded in 2021 to create Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing solutions that can cost effectively scale to monitor large swathes of the planet with commercially available SAR data. Wolverine Radar proposes to compare Ann Arbor, Michigan’s publicly available impermeability score to dual-polarization coherency scores derived from publicly available Copernicus Sentinel 1 data. While the sentinel data has a coarser resolution than the available impermeability scores, it is more sensitive to the presence of man-made objects than optical photography, because coherence is measured at the wavelength of the transmitter electromagnetic waveform. In addition, Sentinel performs dual polarization collection on every square mile of the Earth’s surface every 12 days. This refresh rate would enable a more proactive system of measurement than the current annual approaches and provide more rapid feedback mechanisms to promote change.