Author(s): Simon Pulido Leboeuf; Ramon Bella Pineiro; Alvaro Rodriguez Garcia; Ana Raquel Genaro Moya; Marcos Antonio Martinez Martinez

Linked Author(s): Ramón Bella Piñeiro, Álvaro Rodríguez García

Keywords: Drought; Scarcity; Flood; Digitalisation; Emergencies

Abstract: An early warning and emergency management support system for municipal emergencies is presented, focused on drought, scarcity and flood events. The main objective is to help in the adaptation to climate change-induced extreme events and the implementation of self-protection municipal plans and to undertake the necessary actions to minimize the impact of emergencies on people and goods. The described system is composed of two parts: and early warning system for each of the events (droughts, scarcity and floods due to heavy rainfall) and a management system to support the coordination between the agents involved in the emergency response: •The early warning system generates and disseminates warnings sourced from static cartography to real time data acquisition, processing (algorithms) and cross-checking with official risk and vulnerability cartography, and vulnerable elements inventory. •The management system enables follow-up through checklists of the actions to be undertaken for each alert level and vulnerable item. Data acquisition includes cartographic information on hydrographic water resources infrastructures like dams, reservoirs, gauging stations, surface and groundwater bodies, rain and snowfall gauges, piezometers, urban and agricultural demand units, the scarcity and drought territorial units, and the flood risk and hazardousness to flood events cartography established by the Spanish water set of regulations for hydrological planning and to face events like droughts (the statistical significant decrease of precipitations that affect resource availability), scarcity (the inability of the hydrological system to supply water resources to the existing demands) and floods. All this information documented and updated in hydrological, flood and scarcity and flood risk management planning documents, from water to local administration, is made available to decision makers and water users through an intuitive, web-based database software service in a normalised, comparable and organised set of viewports and dashboards to provide a one-stop shop for the information that is needed when quick and informed decisions have to be made. The static information is completed with real time information from observation sensors, such as official weather state agency (in Spain, AEMET), rainfall radar antennae, or automatic hydrological information systems (SAIH) for water hydrographic administrations (Confederaciones Hidrográficas), among others, and then combined in weather forecast models, rainfall displacement continuity correction models, statistical intensity-duration-frequency distributions, river streams models, drought and scarcity standard indexes and the sorts, thus obtaining detailed and accurate forecasts on the evolution of the situation, and making it possible to determine and disseminate early warnings to a selected set of user from local to regional administration entities, as well as civil protection response units, implementing the action plans for each alert level and enabling a follow up on these action sets (who has to do what, has it been done, what’s the next step) with a streamlined, robust accessible interface.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/IAHR-39WC2521711920221780

Year: 2022