Satellites, Tweets, Forecasts: The Future of Flood Disaster Management?

Abstract

Floods have devastating effects on lives and livelihoods around the world. Structural flood defense measures such as dikes and dams can help protect people. However, it is the emerging science and technologies for flood disaster management and preparedness, such as increasingly accurate flood early warning systems, high-resolution satellite monitoring, rapid risk mapping, or the use of social media information and crowdsourcing, which are most promising for reducing the impacts of flooding. We propose here a framework that combines the most recent advances in flood early warning, monitoring, and mapping systems with the unique strength of social media streaming and news monitoring in an innovative knowledge trigger cycle. This will allow emergency responders to have a broad range of timely and accurate information available for more effective and robust planning, decision-making, and resource allocation. The recent large-scale flood event in France (2016) could be used to showcase the proposed framework.

Keywords: Social media, Early warning system, Satellite mapping, flood risk management