“Floodhack” helps to mitigate floods
On 16/17 January ECMWF hosted a hackathon aimed at improving GloFAS by developing innovative ideas and approaches. More than 3.5 TB of data have been prepared, partly served in an OGC-compliant Web Coverage Service Standard (WCS) for easier data access and retrieval. In the EarthhServer-2 project, this WCS service is currently set up at ECMWF and further institutions in Great Britain. Earthserver-2 is funded under Horizon's 2020 call H2020-EINFRA-2014-2: See more at: http://www.earthserver.eu/about#sthash.6GoeYBel.dpuf. Five teams submitted their work, most of them based on the Big Datacube server rasdaman running at ECMWF which offers 5-dimensional river discharge data, among others: • FloodIT: Providing more intuitive information based on GLOFAS which helps forecasting local floodings and pre-empting a catastrophe. • GloFAQ - Global Flood Awareness Queries: Innovative ways of providing end users with key information on potentially impacted infrastructures due to flooding. • Interception: A flood awareness education platform which helps informing people about alternative courses of action when a flood watch/warning alert is issued. • LIVE - Logistic and Infrastructure Visual Evaluation: Using GloFAS forecast information to create a 'time to respond' map. • The (flooded) Italian Job: An automatised modification of fixed GloFAS thresholds for warnings. The winning team, LIVE, used GloFAS information creating a "time to respond map" that helps prioritizing decision making before or during a flood event. The second prize went to FloodIT, the third winner was Interception. The GloFAS system is currently used by the International Red Cross in a pilot project in Daares-Salaam, Tanzania for finance forecasting which enables Red Cross to spot early on where flood disaster support is required. The FloodHack price money - in total 1.050 GBP - was donated to this project. Read more at http://floodhack.devpost.com/
Keywords
Big Earth Data, OGC
Countries
Australia, Germany, Greece, Italy, United Kingdom, United States