<p>Inundation is one of the major natural hazards in Europe. The evaluation of the flood hazard and risk is not straightforward mainly due to the monitoring system that is poor or not uniformly distributed in the territory. The ESA Earth Observation Program, including a series of satellites, Sentinels, for the operative observation of the natural phenomenon, e.g. the inundations, can potentially reduce the gap. Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (optical) are demonstrated suitable for mapping flooded areas, but despite the medium-high spatial and temporal resolution of the sensors, the mapping of inundated territories is often partial or missing. The objective of this study is to evaluate through a synthetic study the effectiveness of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 in the systematic assessment of floods in Europe, where the flood events have duration ranging from some hours to a few days. To reach the target, we analysed ten years of river discharge data over almost 2000 sites in Europe and we extracted flood events over some established thresholds, as proxies of flood riverine inundations. Based on the revisit time of the satellites constellations and cloud coverage, we derived the percentage of potential inundation events that Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 could be able to observe. Results show that assuming the configuration of a constellation of two satellites for each mission and considering the ascending and descending orbit, on average the 58 % of flood events are potentially observable by Sentinel-1 and only the 28 % by Sentinel-2 due to the cloud coverage.</p>