HR: 0800h
AN: H21F-0811    [Abstracts]
TI: An Assessment of Capacity, Gaps and Opportunities toward Building a Global Early Warning System for Flood Disasters
AU: * Hong, Y
EM: yanghong@ou.edu
AF: University of Oklahoma, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, Norman, OK 73019, United States
AU: * Hong, Y
EM: yanghong@ou.edu
AF: NASA GSFC, Code 613.1, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Adler, R
EM: adler@agnes.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA GSFC, Code 613.1, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Huffman, G
EM: huffman@agnes.gsfc.nasa,gov
AF: NASA GSFC, Code 613.1, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AB: Many governmental emergency management agencies or non-governmental organizations need real-time information on emerging disasters for preparedness and response. However, progress in warnings for hydrologic disasters has been constrained by the difficulty of measuring spatiotemporal variability of rainfall fluxes continuously over space and time, due largely to insufficient ground monitoring networks, long delay in data transmission and absence of data sharing protocols among many geopolitically trans-boundary basins. In addition, in-situ gauging stations are often washed away by the very floods they are designed to monitor, making reconstruction of gauges a common post-flood activity around the world. In reality, remote sensing precipitation estimates may be the only source of rainfall information available over much of the globe, particularly for vulnerable countries in the tropics where abundant extreme rain storms and severe flooding events repeat every year. Building on progress in remote sensing technology, researchers have improved the accuracy, coverage, and resolution of rainfall estimates by combining imagery from infrared, passive microwave, and weather radar sensors. Today, remote sensing imagery acquired and processed in real time can provide near-real-time rainfall fluxes at relatively fine spatiotemporal scales (kilometers to tens of kilometers and 30-minute to 3-hour). These new suites of rainfall products have the potential to support daily decision-making in analysis of hydrologic hazards. This talk will address several key issues, including remote sensing rainfall retrieval and data assimilation, for hydrologists to develop alternative satellite-based flood warning systems that may supplement in-situ infrastructure when conventional data sources are denied due to natural or administrative causes. This talk will also assess a module-structure global flood prediction system that has been running at real-time by integrating remote sensing forcing data with simplified hydrological models, in an effort to offer a practical solution to the challenge of building cost-effective flood warning systems for the data-spares regions of the world. The real-time outlook of hazardous floods will quickly disseminate through an open-access web-interface to many agencies and organizations for their daily decision-making, with the potential to save human life and reduce economic impacts. The interactive Web interface will also show close-up maps of the disaster risks overlaid on population or integrated with the Google-Earth visualization tool.
UR: http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications_dir/potential_flood_hydro.html
DE: 1821 Floods
DE: 1854 Precipitation (3354)
DE: 1855 Remote sensing (1640)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting