Extending Dynamic World Surface Water Mapping to Sentinel-1 with AlphaEarth Embeddings

Abstract

Dynamic World (DW) maps land use and land cover globally at 10 m from Sentinel-2 (S2) imagery, but only for cloud-free observations, which limits where and when surface water can be mapped. We use the DW water class as weak supervision for a Sentinel-1 (S1) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) model so that DW-like water maps can be produced for every S1 acquisition. Google's AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) annual embedding supplies spatial context, while S1 backscatter supplies the acquisition-time observation. On 53 globally distributed scenes with independent annotations of 3 m PlanetScope imagery acquired within 48 h of the S1 overpass, the S1-only model already reaches a pooled water intersection over union (IoU) of 0.77, comparable to 0.75 for the operational OPERA DSWx-S1 product, and adding AEF raises it to 0.85. The fused model improves on the S1-only model on 44 of 53 scenes and exceeds OPERA on 48, and on the independent S1S2-Water benchmark it reaches 0.94, compared with 0.87 for OPERA. Optical land-cover products can thus provide scalable training labels for SAR surface water mapping.