Visualisation of flooding along an unvegetated, ephemeral river using Google Earth Engine: Implications for assessment of channel-floodplain dynamics in a time of rapid environmental change

Given rapid environmental change, the development of new, data-driven, interdisciplinary approaches is essential for improving assessment and management of river systems, especially with respect to flooding. In the world's extensive drylands, difficulties in obtaining field observations of major hydrological events mean that remote sensing techniques are commonly used to map river floods and assess flood impacts. Such techniques, however, are dependent on available cloud-free imagery during or immediately after peak discharge, and single images may omit important flood-related hydrogeomorphological events. Here, we combine multiple Landsat images from Google Earth Engine (GEE) with precipitation datasets and high-resolution (