Abstract
Every year riverine flooding affects millions of people in developing countries, due to the large population exposure in the floodplains and the lack of adequate flood protection measures. Preparedness and monitoring are effective ways to reduce flood risk. State-of-the-art technologies relying on satellite remote sensing as well as numerical hydrological and weather predictions can detect and monitor severe flood events at a global scale. This paper describes the emerging role of the Global Flood Partnership (GFP), a global network of scientists, users, private and public organizations active in global flood risk management. Currently, a number of GFP member institutes regularly share results from their experimental products, developed to predict and monitor where and when flooding is taking place in near real-time. GFP flood products have already been used on several occasions by national environmental agencies and humanitarian organizations to support emergency operations and to reduce the overall socio-economic impacts of disasters. This paper describes a range of global flood products developed by GFP partners, and how these provide complementary information to support and improve current global flood risk management for large scale catastrophes. We also discuss existing challenges and ways forward to turn current experimental products into an integrated flood risk management platform to improve rapid access to flood information and increase resilience to flood events at global scale.
Highlights
Riverine flooding affects the vast majority of the world’s regions
Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) have dramatically benefited from satellite data to improve forecast skill over the oceans, in areas poorly covered by conventional measurement networks, and in general to extend their predictability in time and for extreme events (Bouttier and Kelly, 2001)
The Global Flood Partnership (GFP) community and its products provide access to a wealth of data focused on flood management, though coming from many different groups with a range of different backgrounds
Summary
Riverine flooding affects the vast majority of the world’s regions. Flood risk has considerable spatial variability, due to heterogeneous natural processes, varied exposure and vulnerability to flooding, and to each country’s or region’s investments in flood preparedness and mitigation. Alfieri et al (2017) estimated that combined flood losses in Asia and Africa account for 95% of people annually affected by floods globally and 73% of the total direct economic damage. Different sensors mounted on satellites have shown key capabilities in detecting and monitoring surface water extent (Pekel et al, 2016), rivers and lakes height (Alsdorf et al, 2007; Calmant et al, 2008), and large-scale flooding (Smith, 1997) Such a wealth of data available in near real-time has prompted research groups from many institutions worldwide to develop methods for flood prediction and monitoring at large scales. An immediate consequence is the need to 1) adapt experimental scientific tools for operational emergency activities, and 2) identify the limits of applicability of each tool and its outputs To this end, the Global Flood Partnership (GFP, https://gfp.jrc.ec.europa.eu) was established as an open international group of academics, research institutes, practitioners, public and private organizations active in the field of flood risk and emergency management. A non-exhaustive list of GFP flood products available for operational flood risk reduction is reported in Table S1 of the Supplementary material
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