Recent Advances in Real-Time Pluvial Flash Flood Forecasting

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed considerable developments in multiple fields with the potential to enhance our capability of forecasting pluvial flash floods, one of the most costly environmental hazards in terms of both property damage and loss of life. This work provides a summary and description of recent advances related to insights on atmospheric conditions that precede extreme rainfall events, to the development of monitoring systems of relevant hydrometeorological parameters, and to the operational adoption of weather and hydrological models towards the prediction of flash floods. With the exponential increase of available data and computational power, most of the efforts are being directed towards the improvement of multi-source data blending and assimilation techniques, as well as assembling approaches for uncertainty estimation. For urban environments, in which the need for high-resolution simulations demands computationally expensive systems, query-based approaches have been explored for the timely retrieval of pre-simulated flood inundation forecasts. Within the concept of the Internet of Things, the extensive deployment of low-cost sensors opens opportunities from the perspective of denser monitoring capabilities. However, different environmental conditions and uneven distribution of data and resources usually leads to the adoption of site-specific solutions for flash flood forecasting in the context of early warning systems.

The Value of Urban Flood Modeling

“…There are benefits and limitations associated with each approach: simpler models have fewer input data requirements and computational requirements, but are limited in their capability to accurately represent many urban flooding processes. More complex models are often limited by availability of input data for parameterization or in their capability to run rapidly enough to support real‐time forecasting and warning (Costabile et al., 2020; Zanchetta & Coulibaly, 2020).…”

Hydrometeorology: Review of Past, Present and Future Observation Methods

“…It is called operational hydrometeorology and deals with the application of hydrometeorology to real-time operational systems. The major components in an operational prediction system are monitoring equipment, meteorological and hydrological forecasting models, demand (water supply) prediction models, and decision support tools [76,77]. The difficulty of forecasting rainfall has become a main challenge in the development of operational hydrometeorology [76].…”

Curating and Visualizing Dense Networks of Monsoon Precipitation Data: Integrating Computer Science Into Forward Looking Climate Services Development

“…Information about the spatial variability and range of intensity of storm events would be useful across a range of decision making contexts. This includes flood control and emergency management (Zanchetta and Coulibaly, 2020), phenology and invasive species green-up (Wallace et al, 2016), and irrigation control and water use decisions (Goap et al, 2018).…”