Flood early-warning systems

Typical hazards

 

Since time out of mind, floods, mainly caused by rain storms, melting snow or long-term rainy weather, have represented a serious hazard to the both property and human lives in some regions. The level of preciseness, with which meteorologists forecast such events, is reasonably high nowadays despite the fact that it is quite difficult to forecast intensive local rainfall. It requires expensive technical equipment designed to monitor weather conditions, especially its cloudiness, and systems designed to monitor water levels of various, otherwise inconspicuous, creeks and potential waterways. Since storm water can represent very sudden danger, it is necessary to warn people in danger very fast and in an efficient manner.

 

Solution description

 

This solution integrates a warning and notification system with a monitoring system or several monitoring systems. The warning and notification part of the system is used to warn and notify people in danger in several stages based on information from a monitoring system. In order to acquire potential hazard data various procedures are used depending on whether such floods were caused by long-term rainy weather and raised river levels or by rain storms and their subsequent sudden floods. Computer simulations are nowadays able to specify area points of higher probability of danger. Monitoring systems provide information in two basic ways:

• They forecast flood conditions on the basis of information obtained from special meteorological stations;

• They inform on actual water levels in rivers, creeks or in points, down which rain storm water usually flows;

This solution of a flood early-warning system can work with information from meteorological stations and from existing monitoring systems. It can also use its own system for water level monitoring. The main communication channel of its monitoring system and of a warning system is a radio channel and it is shared by both of the systems, thus reducing costs of their establishment. To create a short-distance connection of sensors and the main communication channel radio technology is used. The system consists of:

• An evaluation and warning centre, which can be fully automated;

• Communication infrastructure;

• Level sensors;