Flood Monitoring and Early Warning Systems – An IoT Based Perspective

Abstract

One of the most frequently occurring calamities around the world is the flood. For flood prone areas or countries, an essential part of their governance is flood management. The necessity to continuously review and analyse the adverse or ambient environmental conditions in real-time demands developing a monitoring system so that floods could be detected beforehand. This paper discusses different Internet of Things (IoT) based techniques and applications implemented for efficient flood monitoring and an early warning system and it is observed that in future, the combination of IoT and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data may be helpful to develop robust and secure flood monitoring and early warning system that provides effective and efficient mapping during natural disasters. The emerging technology in the discipline of computing is IoT, an embedded system that enables devices to gather real-time data to further store it in the computational devices using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for further processing. The IoT based projects that can help collect data from sensors are an added advantage for researchers to explore in providing better services to people. These systems can be integrated with cloud computing and analyzing platforms. Researchers recently have focussed on mathematical modeling based flood prediction schemes rather than physical parametric based flood prediction. The new methodologies explore the algorithmic approaches. There have been many systems proposed based on analog technology to web-based and now using mobile applications. Further, alert systems have been designed using web-based applications that gather processed data by Arduino Uno Microcontroller which is received from ultrasonic and rain sensors. Additionally, the machine learning based embedded systems can measure different atmospheric conditions such as temperature, moisture, and rains to forecast floods by analyzing varying trends in climatic changes.