Spring floods in North America
The upper Mississippi basin in the United States is currently facing one of its worst flooding situations in decades due to the excess snowmelt being drained by the river basin.
The severity of the flooding in Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin, one of the worst affected areas, is depicted in this image acquired by one of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites on 1 May. According to the National Weather Service, some areas in the region have seen their third-highest floodwater peak on record.
The Global Flood Monitoring (GFM) of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service is a fully automated system that uses Copernicus Sentinel-1 data to monitor floods worldwide in real time, providing flood monitoring maps within eight hours of satellite image acquisition at a spatial resolution of 20m at global level.
![Download [WEBP, 590.98 KB]](https://eu-space.europa.eu/sites/default/files/images/iotd/20230503_PrairieduChienWisconsin.webp){kind=link}