Aquavar: Decision Support System for Surface and Groundwater Management at the Catchment Scale

Abstract

Due to the impacts of global warming or climate changes, the hazard caused by extreme weather event becomes more frequent and serious. At same time, the last available place such as the floodplain has been strongly encroached by the growing of urbanization, which could lead more citizens to be exposed to flood risks. In current situation, the flood caused by extreme rainfall event could be characterized with shorter response time and higher flood damages. To efficiently manage this kind of flood hazard and effectively reduce the damage cost, the Decision Support System (DSS) applied in urban management has been requested to be able to produce comprehensive view of current situation in real time and further provide accurate forecast as faster and possible. Benefited from the progress of informatics and monitoring techniques, the fast increase of monitoring devices lets the real time data collection become more feasible. And the development of modelling system of hydrology and hydraulic has reach a higher level during last decades, which nowadays is bale to integrated assess the existing catchment water system and further forecast the incoming situation. Integration of those new techniques into DSS, the design of the DSS architecture should be reorganized to make the system become more operational and functional. This paper presents a generic operational DSS approach in order to address the management of natural hazards (floods & draughts) in a sophisticated urban environment and provide both real time assessment and forecast on a Web-based information platform. The proposed approach is illustrated with one model integrated real time DSS application (AquaVar DSS) on Var catchment (2800 km2) located at French Riviera. Three deterministic distributed model applications of hydrology, hydraulic and groundwater has been integrated into the modelling system at analytic part of the DSS and linked with a Web-based user interface to provide sufficient information for real time risk management in the area. The integrated representation provided by AquaVar DSS has confirmed the feasibility of applying this DSS approach for dealing with extreme hazards. And similar approach could also be implemented in other managements of urban environment and related services such as energy distribution or water distribution.