The Design and Implementation of a Wireless Flood Monitoring System

Floods and excessive rainfall are unavoidable phenomena that can cause massive loss of people's lives and destruction of infrastructure. The impact of floods on human lives can be avoided by the Flood Monitoring Systems (FMS). There are many systems used in practice by disaster management agencies for monitoring flood levels. However, most of these systems are very costly and sophisticated to be used and maintained. Most of the conventional floodgates in water canals are manually-operated and suffer from the lack of realtime monitoring of water levels which might lead to overflow in the canals and flash floods. Therefore, in this paper, we have developed an innovative, cost-effective, and user-friendly water level measurement system. The developed system exploits ultrasonic sensor with Arduino microcontroller to measure the water level and identify the situation whether it is safe, cautious or dangerous based on the predefined levels. The implemented prototype alerts individuals and/or authorities separately via SMS using GSM module or Bluetooth. Our system has been tested as an individual unit and the results were very promising. It can monitor the water level accurately and show visual alerts using a LED, in addition, it can send messages via Bluetooth and Cellular networks. In the future, we are going to implement multiple units of the developed system to work as a wireless network for flood monitoring.