Liu Liang, Zhang Wei, Jiang Xiaoguang, Li Xianbin, Huo Hongyuan, Zhang Xuehua, (doi: 10.23953/cloud.ijarsg.43)

The C Satellite of Environment and Disaster Monitoring and Forecasting Small Satellite Constellation (HJ-1-C) was launched successfully on 19 November 2012. It is the first Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite for civil use in China and the only S-band SAR satellite on orbit in the world at present. One of its applications is to extract water body, which can be used for assessing the severity of floods or drought. As the user of the S Band SAR Satellite of HJ-1-C, the National Disaster Reduction Center of China (NDRCC) has the responsibility to assess its water body extraction capability and precision. This study validates the water extraction precision using the HJ-1-C by means of comparison with water body delineation using optical images of the HJ-1-B and ZY-3. The result shows that, the C Satellite has a prominent advantage in extracting details of water bodies as compared with the HJ-1-A and HJ-1-B.