[OSGeo-Announce] “Floodhack” helps mitigating Floods

[Jorge Sanz]

On 16/17 January, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather
Forecasts (ECMWF) organized the first hackathon on a Global Flood
Awareness System (GloFAS). More than 60 participants from research
organizations, universities and industries joined for improving
accessibility and visualization of GloFAS data by creating new
downstream applications.

Anticipation and preparedness of large-scale flood events play a key
role in mitigating their impacts and optimizing the strategic planning
of water resources. Although a lot of countries have well-established
systems for river monitoring and early flood warning, an increasing
number of inhabitants is affected by floods every year. The Global
Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) has been set up providing an overview
on upcoming floodings in large world river basins.

On 16/17 January ECMWF hosted a hackathon aimed at improving GloFAS by
developing innovative ideas and approaches. More than 3.5 TB of data
have been prepared, partly served in an OGC-compliant Web Coverage
Service Standard (WCS) for easier data access and retrieval. In the
EarthServer-2 project, this WCS service is currently set up at ECMWF
and further institutions in Great Britain.

Five teams submitted their work, most of them based on the Big
Datacube server rasdaman running at ECMWF which offers 5-dimensional
river discharge data, among others:

- FloodIT: Providing more intuitive information based on GLOFAS which
helps forecasting local floodings and pre-empting a catastrophe.
- GloFAQ - Global Flood Awareness Queries: Innovative ways of
providing end users with key information on potentially impacted
infrastructures due to flooding.
- Interception: A flood awareness education platform which helps
informing people about alternative courses of action when a flood
watch/warning alert is issued.
- LIVE - Logistic and Infrastructure Visual Evaluation: Using GloFAS
forecast information to create a 'time to respond' map.
- The (flooded) Italian Job: An automatised modification of fixed
GloFAS thresholds for warnings.

The winning team, LIVE, used GloFAS information creating a "time to
respond map" that helps prioritizing decision making before or during
a flood event. The second prize went to FloodIT, the third winner was
Interception.

The GloFAS system is currently used by the International Red Cross in
a pilot project in Daares-Salaam, Tanzania for finance forecasting
which enables Red Cross to spot early on where flood disaster support
is required. The FloodHack price money - in total 1.050 GBP - was
donated to this project.

Read more at http://floodhack.devpost.com/