Tackling The Issue Of Flooding In The African Union

Water is an oxymoron, it gives life but it also takes mercilessly. Floods area major issue in many parts of Africa and the devastating effects they leave can affect a community drastically. The African Union has a vision for an ideal Africa with adequate food and security and in order to achieve these aims the effects of these disasters have to be mitigated or completely prevented, this is where flood detection comes in.

With advanced warning communities can plan ahead for evacuation, food storage and preservation and general preparation for the damages and the effects the floods might have on their everyday lives and Satellite communication can play a major role in the prediction and detection of floods as well as aid in preventive measures taken.

The customary technique for tackling the issue of flooding was the Flood Disaster Management System (FDMS). It incorporates different ecological models and gets to an assortment of information sources to give flood reduction capabilities all through the whole disaster management cycle. The method is an approach that links environmental models and disaster-related data through semantics. The system largely improved the efficiency of flood disaster reduction by reducing time of workflow construction and disaster-related data retrieval, as well as simplifying the man-machine interaction operations of responders. A methodology for satellite based flood detection developed at Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) was modified at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and implemented on an automatic operational basis. The technique uses AMSR-E passive microwave remote sensing data of the descending orbit, H polarization, 36 GHz band which is sensitive to water surface changes. The sensor revisits every place on Earth once per day and can therefore provide a daily temporal resolution. Sensor data is available 24 hours after acquisition. Thresholding the signal of water surface change allows the detection of riverine inundation events. The comparison of gauging and satellite measurements show a significant correlation in the increase of river discharge on-site and changes in the observed signal of the sensor. Thus the technique for the detection of flood events in ungauged and inaccessible remote river channels is feasible from space. A procedure chain was developed at the JRC to automatically acquire and process the remotely sensed data in real time on an operational basis. After the validation of the satellite based Global Flood Detection System (GFDS) the remotely observed flood events are to be integrated into the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System including the estimation of its humanitarian impact. GDACS is running at the JRC providing near real-time alerts about humanitarian and natural disasters around the world and tools to facilitate response coordination, including news and maps. Floods are the most common phenomenon that causes human suffering, inconvenience and widespread damage to buildings, structures, crops and infrastructures. Floods have been observed to disrupt personal, economic & social activities and set back a nations security & development by destroying roads, buildings and other assets. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for the practical purposes. Applications of this knowledge can help Africa to detect floods which will provide Africans with information which will help in adequate preparation thereby helping reduce losses in lives and properties.

One of the major causes of flooding, this means that to be able to forecast floods, we need to be able to forecast rain i. e. meteorogical forecasts. This has improved continuously over the years thanks to satellite and remote sensing technologies collecting observational data of very high spatial and temporal solutions, over land surfaces and oceans, which then can be assimilated into modern weather forecasting models. This technology can help by increasing warning time, providing complementary comparison data, providing information on river basin level and filling the gaps i. e. helping countries which do not have national flood early warning systems in place. Technology is already being used overseas to help in flood detection, for example, European Flood Awareness Systems (EFAS) has been designed to close the gap of only partially existing probabilistic forecasting by providing Europe-wide forecasting information with lead times up to 10 days, it operated for the first time in 2010 where it provided the Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC) in Europe with an early warning for Poland and they were able to adequately prepare for the event. This kind of system can also be employed in Africa.