flood forecasting system river Po, Italy

Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) Po is a an interregional flood forecasting system used to protect the population living along the Po river course from flood risk. The river Po forecasting system involves the Emilia Romagna, Lombardy, Piedmont, Aosta and Veneto regions. It is operated by the environmental protection agency ARPA Emilia Romagna (ARPA) at the premises of the interregional river monitoring centre AIPO in Parma, Italy. The system has been developed by Deltares with subcontractor Tessella Scientific Software Solutions (UK) including hydrological and hydraulic models from the Italian software vendor Progea Srl, DHI and Deltares.

project description: floodforecasting system river Po, Italy

National Flood Forecasting System (NFFS)

The existing flood forecasting systems used within the Environment Agency in England and Wales are largely bespoke software packages following the closed architecture philosophy. Without the intervention of the original software producer, extending these systems by "plugging in" either additional forecasting models, or new data flows such as from state-of-the art numerical weather prediction, is often impossible. To resolve this, the Environment Agency has commissioned Deltares and Tessella Scientific Software Solutions (UK) in 2003 to supply a National Flood Forecasting System (NFFS) that has at its heart an open architecture generic shell, with an open interface to a standardised set of models used for flood forecasting in the eight regional forecasting systems in operation. The development phase of the project will be finished by September 2006

Project description: National Flood Forecasting System, Engeland & Wales (in PDF)

FEWS Rhine

An operational version of Delft-FEWS for the river Rhine in Germany and Switzerland is currently under development. Being a transboundary river, a flood forecasting system for the Rhine needs to be capable of linking to a variety monitoring systems as well as to communicate with the (regional) forecasting systems already in place. This application illustrates the flexibility and high degree of customisation that is possible with Delft-FEWS.

European Flood Forecasting System (EFFS)

The EC-funded EFFS Project aims at developing a prototype of a European flood forecasting system with a 4-10 days lead time. This system provides daily information on potential floods in large rivers such as the Rhine and the Oder as well as flash floods in smaller basins. This flood forecasting system can be used as a pre-warning system to water authorities that already have a 0-3 day forecasting system. The system can also provide flood warnings for catchments that at present do not have a forecasting system (some of the Eastern European countries). Delft-FEWS is used to integrate local forecasts, detailed models for specific basins as well as a broad scale model for entire Europe. Together with end users, channels to disseminate the forecasts and their uncertainties will be developed.

A new feature of the EFFS project is the application of a three-tiered meteorological forecast strategy to the problem of hydrological forecasting. The three types are (I) short range forecasts that provide very detailed forecasts, (ii) a deterministic hydrological forecast, that provides more accurate risk assessments at lead times in the range of 3-6 days, and (iii) hydrological forecasts that will provide useful warnings, at 5-10 day lead-times, of the probability of extreme events.