Near Real-time Flood Alerting for the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System

A new flood monitoring module is in development for the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS). GDACS is an information system designed to assist humanitarian responders with their decisions in the early onset after a disaster. It provides near-real time flood alerts with an initial estimate of the consequences based on computer models. Subsequently, the system gathers information in an automated way from relevant information sources such as international media, mapping and scientific organizations. The novel flood detection methodology is based on daily AMSR-E passive microwave measurement of 2500 flood prone sites on 1435 rivers in 132 countries. Alert thresholds are determined from the time series of the remote observations and these are validated using available flood archives (from 2002 to present). Preliminary results indicate a match of 47% between detected floods and flood archives. Individual tuning of thresholds per site should improve this result.

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