Reading a flood claim at Conselice while the water was still on the ground

On 16 and 17 May 2023 a second wave of rain in a fortnight fell on Emilia-Romagna, and rivers that had already burst their banks earlier in the month went over again. The Sillaro embankment gave way near Conselice in the Province of Ravenna, and the plain around the town filled.

This case reads one agricultural parcel just west of the town, inside the flooded plain, as a claims desk would receive it: a boundary, a date of loss of 20 May, and a question about what happened on that ground. It is one of our own test cases, not a customer's claim.

The parcel was read with Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar, which sees through cloud. Ten passes between 23 March and 11 May 2023 set the parcel's own reference before the loss. Two passes on 22 and 23 May, two and three days after the date of loss, were compared with that reference.

Ground that turned newly wet between the two was mapped and counted in hectares. Permanent water from the JRC Global Surface Water record was taken out first, so a canal or a pond is never counted as flood. The same parcel was then read on the first clear Sentinel-2 optical scene after the loss.

For a claims desk the useful reading is the one taken while the water can still be seen. Radar puts that reading inside the window, and the record names every pass by date so an adjuster can open the same scenes.

The record says what the ground showed and when. It does not settle the claim; the desk does. What it removes is the question of whether anything happened on the parcel at all, which is the question that otherwise sends an adjuster out to look at a field that has already dried.

The same reading runs on a book of claims. Ten closed claims from last season, re-read against what the adjusters found, is the quickest way to see where it fits a desk's own process.