Development of a Web-based Interactive Fully Integrated Flood Early Warning System (Wi-Fi FEWS)

Flood early warning systems (FEWS) are part of both flood preparedness and flood response actions within the emergency management context as a measure that can help save lives, and mitigate losses during floods. Considerable investment has been made in this field with the hope of providing assistance to emergency management agencies. Further improvement in cyber infrastructure is now making it possible to take advantage of the rapid development of web processing and web mapping services, geospatial information systems, open-GIS, and other open source computational. Fidel Perez, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Brigham Young University, jfidelp@yahoo.com Jim Nelson, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Brigham Young University,jimn@byu.edu Norm Jones, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Brigham Young University, njones@byu.edu This presentation describes CI-Water initiative, to link multipurpose Decision Support Systems with FEWS that runs in a cloud computing environment. The system will connect data streams (from satellite, radar or ground stations, and data repositories) and meteorological forecast products provided by NWS and NHC, to a cascade of models for hydrologic and hydraulic (H&H) analysis. It will be hosted/supported in a cyberinfrastructure that provides network connectivity to high-performance computing capacity or any other adequate network configuration under open architecture that can be accessed via the web. It will allow emergency managers to use models under crisis situations and perform computational simulation in minutes with data-intensive modeling,. It will be an interactive system that does not require managers to know model intricacies while allowing experienced hydrologists to add watersheds and/or stream reaches, change model parameters, and couple H&H models with artificial neural networks in order to improve forecast accuracy. The ensemble of tools and models can be extended for use in regular monitoring and operations, such as those that can be applied in water management under drought situations Existing systems and approaches to FEWS are under revision for the purpose of bench marking the available technologies and system performance. The WiFi- FEWS will be developed from the ongoing components of CI-Water and will be against known phenomenon before used in a forecasting mode