Interoperable Infrastructure for Flood Monitoring: SensorWeb, Grid and Cloud

The paper presents an international multi-disciplinary initiative, a Namibia SensorWeb Pilot Project, that was created as a testbed for evaluating and prototyping key technologies for rapid acquisition and distribution of data products for decision support systems to monitor floods. Those key technologies include SensorWebs, Grids and Computation Clouds. This pilot project aims at developing an operational trans-boundary flood management decision support system for the Southern African region to provide useful flood and water-borne disease forecasting tools for local decision makers. This effort integrates space-based and ground sensor data along with higher level geospatial data products to enable risk assessment and ultimately risk maps related to flood disaster management and water-related disease management. We present an overall architecture of the Pilot along with components and services being developed. Additionally, case-studies and results achieved so far are discussed. The presented work is being carried out within GEO 2009–2011 Work Plan as CEOS WGISS contribution