High-tech instruments give residents 10 days' flood warning
August 2, 2007
For the first time, a high-tech forecasting system is providing residents of rural areas of Bangladesh with up to 10 days' notice of potentially deadly floods, including floods that are occurring at present along the Brahmaputra River.
Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Georgia Institute of Technology developed the system.
The forecasts are being distributed directly to communities, and individual households when necessary, in the vulnerable flood plains of the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers.
The system uses a combination of weather forecast models, satellite observations, river gauges and new hydrologic modeling techniques to predict when major rivers will crest in selected regions of Bangladesh during the nation's often devastating flood season, which runs until October.
"This is cutting-edge technology, in which we analyze information from a number of sources to generate forecasts of the probability of major flooding," says NCAR scientist Thomas Hopson, who helped develop the forecasting system. "This is the first time that long-term flood forecasts are consistently reaching many rural individuals in Bangladesh, such as farmers and fishermen."
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