From Risk to Opportunity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hydrological …, 2012
Although ensemble prediction systems (EPS) are increasingly promoted as the scientific state-of-the-art for operational flood forecasting, the communication, perception, and use of the resulting alerts have received much less attention. Using a variety of qualitative research methods, including direct user feedback at training workshops, participant observation during site visits to 25 forecasting centres across Europe, and in-depth interviews with 69 forecasters, civil protection officials, and policy makers involved in operational flood risk management in 17 European countries, this article discusses the perception, communication, and use of European Flood Alert System (EFAS) alerts in operational flood management. In particular, this article describes how the design of EFAS alerts has evolved in response to user feedback and desires for a hydrographic-like way of visualizing EFAS outputs. It also documents a variety of forecaster perceptions about the value and skill of EFAS forecasts and the best way of using them to inform operational decision making. EFAS flood alerts were generally welcomed by flood forecasters as a sort of 'pre-alert' to spur greater internal vigilance. In most cases, however, they did not lead, by themselves, to further preparatory action or to earlier warnings to the public or emergency services. Their hesitancy to act in response to medium-term, probabilistic alerts highlights some wider institutional obstacles to the hopes in the research community that EPS will be readily embraced by operational forecasters and lead to immediate improvements in flood incident management. The EFAS experience offers lessons for other hydrological services seeking to implement EPS operationally for flood forecasting and warning.
Atmospheric Research, 2011
In the course of the D-PHASE project, a visualisation platform was created, which provided a large amount of meteorological and hydrological information that was used not only by scientists, but also by scientifically aware laypeople in the field of flood prevention. This paper investigates the benefits of the platform for its end-users' situation analysis and decision making, and in particular, its usefulness in providing an ensemble of models instead of already interpreted forecasts. To evaluate the platform's impact on users in Switzerland, a panel approach was used. Twenty-four semi-standardized questionnaires were completed at the beginning of the demonstration phase and 27 questionnaires were completed five months later. The results suggest that the platform was perceived as adding value to both situation analysis and decision making, and helped users to feel more confident about both. Interestingly, users' preference for receiving complex, primary information and forming their own impressions over receiving interpreted information and recommendations increased during the demonstration phase. However, no actual improvement in the quality of decisions was reported.
The recent floods of June 2007 on the Hunter River, NSW highlighted opportunities to improve the flood forecast information presently available for Emergency Management on large river floodplains. Currently adopted flood forecasting practice for prediction of flood levels in the lower reaches of river floodplains, especially in tidally influenced areas, is often limited by a lack of accurate flood prediction tools for these floodplain zones. The lack of a suitably accurate flood level prediction in lower river and floodplain areas is reflected by forecasts which are more qualitative in their description of possible flood outcomes, rather than a quantitative prediction of peak water levels which could be used to definitively activate a Flood Emergency Response Plan. Flood behaviour in lower catchment reaches is typically complex, often characterised by variable and numerous interactions of flow between the river channel and floodplain flow paths; variable take-up of floodplain storag...
An operational decision support system for flood risk mapping, forecasting and management
Urban Water, 1999
The paper describes the development of an integrated tool for planning and management that, taking advantage of available high performance computer platforms, allows location of areas at risk and estimation of expected damages (1); to forecast¯oods and inundation phenomena on the basis of real-time analysis of the present meteorological situation and forecasts available at dierent time and space scales (2); to evaluate the eects of decisions aimed at reducing social, economical and environmental damages on the basis of planned or real-time forecasted scenarios (3); to allow continuous training of personnel (4). Ó
Hydrology , 2020
Floods are usually highly destructive, which may cause enormous losses to lives and property. It is, therefore, important and necessary to develop effective flood early warning systems and disseminate the information to the public through various information sources, to prevent or at least mitigate the flood damages. For flood early warning, novel methods can be developed by taking advantage of the state-of-the-art techniques (e.g., ensemble forecast, numerical weather prediction, and service-oriented architecture) and data sources (e.g., social media), and such developments can offer new insights for modeling flood disasters, including facilitating more accurate forecasts, more efficient communication, and more timely evacuation. The present Special Issue aims to collect the latest methodological developments and applications in the field of flood early warning. More specifically, we collected a number of contributions dealing with: (1) an urban flash flood alert tool for megacities; (2) a copula-based bivariate flood risk assessment; and (3) an analytic hierarchy process approach to flash flood impact assessment.
This chapter explores the practical challenges of communicating and using ensemble forecasts in operational flood incident management. It reviews recent social science research on the variety and effectiveness of HEPS visualization methods and on the cognitive and other challenges experienced by forecast recipients in understanding probabilistic forecasts correctly. To explore how those generic findings from the research literature work out in actual operational practice, the chapter then discusses a series of case studies detailing the development, communication and use of HEPS products in various institutional contexts in France, Britain, and internationally at the EU and global levels. The chapter concludes by drawing out some broader lessons from those experiences about how to communicate and use HEPS more effectively.
Floodrelief - Internet-Based Flood Forecasting Decision Support
Flood forecasting specialists and operational water managers require ready access to a wide range of information including both current and forecasted meteorological conditions, and current and forecasted hydrological conditions to make decisions to initiate flood response measures or to issue flood warnings. Effective flood forecasting systems must provide reliable, accurate and timely forecasts for a range of catchments; from small rapidly responding upstream catchments to larger, more slowly responding downstream locations, often within the same region. Using meteorological observations and quantitative precipitation forecasts to produce hydrological flood forecasts provides valuable increases in lead-time that can be exploited to mitigate the effects of extreme floods. However while the value of accurate meteorological and hydrological forecasts are widely recognised real-time flood management decisions must be based on an understanding of the uncertainties and associated risks....
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2005
The development and implementation of a real-time flood forecasting system in the context of the Piemonte Regions hydro-meteorological operational alert procedure is described. The area of interest is the Upper Po River basin (north-west Italy) of approximately 37 000 km 2 and its river network of about 3000 km and three big lakes. FloodWatch, a GIS-based decision support system for real-time flood forecasting, has been developed and used operationally at the Piemonte Regions Room for the Situation of Natural Hazards in Torino, Italy, since January 2000. The system is linked directly to the telemetric gauges system, uses daily quantitative precipitation and temperature forecasts issued by the Regional Meteorological Service and automatically supplies operational forecasts of water-level and discharge at about 30 locations for up to 48 hours. Strengths and limits of the system and its link with operational flood alert and management are discussed. The case study presented is the October 2000 flood event, when the north-west of Italy experienced one of the largest floods on record. Results highlight how the uncertainty linked to the use of meteorological forecasts greatly influences the quality of the hydrological forecasts. The proposed alert procedure, based on coded risk levels, can help effectively in facing forecast uncertainties.
Challenges in communicating and using ensemble forecasts in operational flood risk management
2010
Following trends in operational weather forecasting, where ensemble prediction systems (EPS) are now increasingly the norm, a number of hydrological and flood forecasting centres internationally have begun to experiment with using similar ensemble methods. Most of the research to date has focused on the substantial technical challenges of developing coupled rainfall-runoff systems to represent the full cascade of uncertainties involved in predicting future flooding. As a consequence much less attention has been given to the communication and eventual use of EPS flood forecasts. Thus, this talk addresses the general understanding and communicative challenges in using EPS in operational flood forecasting. Drawing on a set of 48 semi-structured interviews conducted with flood forecasters, meteorologists and civil protection authorities (CPAs) dispersed across 17 European countries, this presentation pulls out some of the tensions between the scientific development of EPS and their application in flood risk management. The scientific uncertainties about whether or not a flood will occur comprise only part of the wider ‘decision' uncertainties faced by those charged with flood protection, who must also consider questions about how warnings they issue will subsequently be interpreted. By making those first order scientific uncertainties more explicit, ensemble forecasts can sometimes complicate, rather than clarify, the second order decision uncertainties they are supposed to inform.