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The Global Flood Monitor (GFM) of Flootagsmaps the cities around the world which are being hit by a flood in real-time based on twitter messages (see Figure 1, left). The GLObal Flood Forecasting Information System GLObal Flood Forecasting Information System (GLOFFIS) is a global hydrological forecasting system that forecasts river runoff for 1 to 14 days in advance based on external forecasts of precipitation for the entire world, with a resolution of 1 degree (see Figure 1, right). By linking both systems, we can create flood alerts based on real-time ground-truth information about flooding combined with forecasted runoff which will give a idea of how much more flooding is to come. At the same time we can learn from ground-truth flood information about the threshold in simulated runoff at which riverine flooding occurs.
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Figure 2. Global Flood Explorer zoomed into the USA for March 2016
Figure 3. Photos of the flooding in Monroe in March 2016. Source left image, right image
The city of Monroe is located in Louisiana State and the Ouachita River flows through the city. There is a GRDC station in the city called Monroe, which was automatically paired to the city as earlier explained. The flow conditions for Monroe city in the week of 8th-15th March 2016 were looked up in the GLOFFIS system. Figure 4 presents the simulated flow at Monroe station as simulated by GLOFFIS. We can see that our global hydrological model simulate quite extreme conditions, i.e. a flow that has been exceeded by only 0.7% of the historical flows.
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After this proof of concept we will now automate the link between social media flood observations and modeled runoff. The results will be presneted together in a webviewer. A first mockup of how this could look like is shown in Figure 5
Figure 5. Mockup improved Global Flood Monitor with linked ground-thruth and simulated hydrological data