Advanced Flood Warning System
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Technology
A team of researchers from UT, including former Austin Fire Chief of Staff Harry Evans, are working to create a better flash flood warning system to warn people faster during an emergency.
Eleven people died in the Wimberley flood in May, a quarter of all the homes were destroyed and 15,000 trees were ripped from their foundation when 195,000 acre feet of water, enough to fill the AT&T Stadium 82 times over, rushed the city.
"It was a day that this community with a little bit of heaven met a little bit of hell," said Wimberley City Administrator Don Ferguson.
One problem was that city leaders did not know how much water was coming down the Blanco River until it was too late.
"We don't have any advanced warning in Wimberley as far as floods go. The only river gauge that exists on the Blanco River for Wimberley is in Wimberley," Ferguson told a group during a seminar at the University of Texas.
Civil Engineering professor Dr. David Maidment is leading the team.
"What we really need are flood maps on the ground. And what we have now are rain maps in the sky," said Maidment.
Currently, the National Weather Service gets forecasts on just six locations in Travis and Hays Counties and it can take as long as an hour to get the data. The team's solution is a high-performance computing system housed at the Pickle Research Campus.
"We can do the calculations there way faster than they've ever been done before," said Maidment. "And we're calculating the flow of 2.7 million stream branches of the country in 10 minutes."
Maidment said it's much more accurate than simply looking at data from rivers and added the prediction on flooding can be made as soon as 15 hours before the flooding happens. The system calculates forecast 400 times faster than the current system. It is called Stampede and is made up of 500,000 processors that requires 60,000 gallons of water an hour to cool.
The UT system will be put to use in May 2016 when the NWS plans to start using a new national forecasting system, collecting information from hundreds of locations.
Source : Kvue.com
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- Flood management
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