Flood Early Warning System

Enhancing flood risk awareness and response.

Challenge

A key role of the Authority is to alert communities and emergency services about developing flood situations in order to minimise the social, environmental and economic impacts. To do so requires real-time data monitoring tools and support for decision-making, that allow early detection and prediction.

The Duero River Basin Authority’s hydrological and meteorological monitoring network was significantly augmented in 2015 when it was handed control of the National Governments network of gauging stations in the basin. With such a large increase in data, better management and advanced modelling should have been possible but the existing management tools were not up to the task.

ADASA’s Solution

The Duero River Basin Authority engaged ADASA to undertake a major upgrade of its decision support systems to integrate the additional stations and their data, to improve visualization and enhance early warning detection and flood management through flow prediction and flood models.

ADASA first integrated real time data from more than 280 meteorological and hydrological stations into a scalable and fully automated visualisation system called Delft-FEWS. FEWS is adept at importing data from multiple standard interchange formats and includes extensive data validation and improvement tools, essential to good modelling.

ADASA also built numerous hydrological and hydraulic models from this data and visualized in FEWS, giving operators the ability to play back and forward to understand the possible consequences of existing and possible conditions at a detailed level.

Result

The River Authority’s management system now provides a flow forecast of the main control points in the river that facilitates the early warning and the management of flood events based on models of the behavior of all main rivers and tributaries that make up the Duero basin.

In addition to forecasting modeling, the real-time information system semiautomatically reports when the river water level exceeds a pre-established threshold at a certain point. The system sends a warning to the operators so that they respond effectively and take the necessary measures to mitigate the risk.

The system has been successfully tested in different episodes of rainfall that have taken place in recent years and that have caused extraordinary flows in different rivers. Thanks to the decision support system, the operators were able to manage the downstream flows so that they did not exceed the pre-defined flood warning thresholds.

Client

The Duero River Basin Authority monitors and manages the water resources in a basin consisting of more than 83,000 km of rivers that cross the borders of seven regional governments in North-Western Spain.