During the annual meeting of the European Geoscience Union, the results of the most recent research in the field of forecasting and prevention of risks of natural origin were presented
The EGU General Assembly 2020, the annual meeting of the European Geoscience Union, was held last week. Seven days of online and completely free of charge conferences, during which professionals from the scientific world were able to meet each other and the non-specialist public. The meeting touched on a wide range of scientific research topics, from natural hazards to space missions, and climate studies to water management.
Among the many presentations that took place, five were made by CIMA Research Foundation researchers.
The forecasting and prevention of flood risk in Guyana
Among the researches presented, the one brought by Alessandro Masoero and his colleagues of the Hydrology and Hydraulics Department reconstructed the path taken in Guyana in collaboration with the United Nations Programme for Satellite Operational Applications (UNOSAT) within the “Strengthening Disaster Management Capacity of Women in Guyana and Dominica” project, led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and dedicated to the strengthening of resilience to disasters of natural origin.
“The more strictly technical component of the project aims to develop a system of early flood warning at national level, starting with the improvement of the predictive and informative capacity of hydrological models”, says Masoero. In particular, the Foundation’s researchers are working on the development of the forecasting chain, which will then be used for the subsequent communication steps: the drafting of a risk bulletin and dialogue with the local population.
“This work is a meeting point between strictly scientific and technical-application development”, continues the researcher. “We based it on the Flood-PROOFS system, which combines data from observation networks and weather forecasting models to assess the possible effects of precipitation on the ground in a given area”. However, Masoero explains, the difficulty arises when there is a lack of available data.
From community to model. And back
In order to face this problem, researchers from CIMA Research Foundation and UNOSAT, together with the technicians of the Hydrometeorological Service of Guyana, carried out precise hydraulic surveys in the field and collaborated directly with the local communities (the detailed hydraulic forecast, the last piece of the forecasting chain, focused on four locations in Guyana), collecting a series of information on the vulnerability and characteristics of floods in the territory: how often is there a flood? What level does the water reach? “It was therefore not strictly technical information, but it helped to both calibrate the hydraulic model and to better respond to the needs of the communities”, says Masoero. “This way, we were able to develop a forecasting chain capable of indicating, 3-5 days in advance, the probability that the water could exceed a value defined as critical by the community itself”.
The technical-operational data analysis service is entrusted to the Hydrometeorological Service of Guyana, part of the Ministry of Agriculture of the country. The visualization platform is the Carribean Dewetra Platform, developed by the Caribbean Insitute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), which has implemented it since 2011, within the Enhancing Resilience to Reduce Vulnerability in the Caribbean project, starting from the Dewetra system developed by CIMA Research Foundation. In February of this year, CIMH held a workshop on the use of the platform (described here).
In the coming days we will review the other work carried out by our researchers and presented at the EGU General Assembly 2020.