Advanced Flood Prediction with Physics-Guided Deep Learning: Combining UNet, FNO, and SAR/Optical Imagery

Abstract: Accurate and scalable flood mapping remains challenging due to limited ground observations, heterogeneous terrain conditions, and the difficulty of enforcing hydrodynamic consistency within data-driven models. This work introduces a physics-guided deep learning framework that integrates multi-modal remote sensing (Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 optical imagery, and DEM-derived terrain features) with constraints from the depth-averaged shallow water equations (SWE). The proposed hybrid architecture combines a UNet to capture fine-scale spatial details with a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) to model basin-scale hydraulic interactions, while physics-informed residual losses ensure mass and momentum consistency. Evaluated across diverse floodplain settings, the hybrid model achieves an Intersection over Union of 0.82 and an F1 score of 0.90 for flood extent prediction, outperforming UNet-only and FNO-only baselines. Using hydrodynamic simulations as reference data, the model achieves an RMSE of 0.21 m for water depth and 0.15 m/s for flow velocity. Physics consistency is maintained, with low residuals and mass imbalance below 2.1%. Ablation studies confirm that removing physicsbased regularization significantly degrades performance, underscoring the value of physical constraints for stability and generalization. These results demonstrate that embedding hydrodynamic principles into deep learning yields more accurate, reliable, and physically coherent flood predictions, offering strong potential for operational monitoring and large-scale deployment.