Chapter 14 - Flood Monitoring System Using Distributed Hydrologic Modeling for Indus River Basin

Abstract

Hydrometeorological disasters can have devastating, direct impacts on life and property as well as indirect effects on food security, economy, and the livelihoods of communities. The Indus River Basin (IRB) has the highest annual worldwide average number of people physically exposed to floods and landslides, which occur seasonally from storm systems during the monsoon season. In this region to reduce the risk of recurrent flood disasters, there is a critical need need for applied research and development of an operational flood monitoring and prediction system. This chapters looks at the advance flood modeling paradigm that assimilates hydrometeorological forcing such as quantitative precipitation estimation into physically based numerical modeling for flood hazard assessment. We demonstrate the implications of geospatial data from spaceborne sensors and geospatial modeling for hydrologic applications in data-scarce environments. We include a discussion on how to set up a distributed hydrologic modeling framework and assimilate multi-sensor remote sensing data for operational flood forecasting systems for the IRB. We conclude that for future improvements in a flood forecasting framework, attention must be focused on the robustness of model parameters, the accuracy and spatio-temporal resolution of hydrometeorological data, and incorporation of an ensemble forecasting system.