Flood Management Platform for Small Catchments with Crowd Sourcing

Early flood warning and forecasting is particularly challenging for small catchments. The reasons for this include uncertainties on the precipitation forecasts but also inadequate temporal and spatial hydrological input variables due to lacking measuring infrastructure. This paper presents a software solution for flood management specifically for municipalities in Germany with small catchment areas. Based on publicly available meteorological data the platform provides sufficiently early pre-warnings via location-based assessments of precipitation forecasts and optional flood forecasts. In this context, it incorporates volunteers (citizens, municipal employees) to collect and provide data via a smartphone application in order to compensate for the lack of gauge stations. The captured information (VGI)- e.g. water level measurements acquired via image-based measurement methods-are automatically incorporated into the flood forecasting system in order to minimize uncertainties and in order to support the situation monitoring during flood events. A web application (dashboard) visualizes the received information and forecasts thus providing appropriate situation awareness.