Monitoring and forecasting of hazards and impacts

Continuous monitoring of hazard parameters and their precursors is essential to generate accurate warnings in a timely fashion that allow sufficient time for the affected community or communities to enact their disaster management plans appropriate for that hazard. The systems used for detection and monitoring should allow for strict quality control of the data under international standards when these are available. Warning services should have a multi-hazard perspective (e.g., heavy rainfall may trigger flooding and landslides, the warning for which may come from a separate authority) and be coordinated whenever possible to benefit from shared institutional, procedural, and communication networks and capacities.

The WRNs program aims to increase capacities and synergies between NMHSs, NDMAs, and other stakeholder sectors to understand and predict high-impact hydrometeorological events and produce reliable, specific multi-hazard impact-based services. IBF services that integrate human, economic, cultural, risk and uncertainty criteria for weather-related events promote action that improves safety, health, the economy, and the environment.

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Monitoring and forecasting of hazards and impacts / PDF

The Flash Flood Guidance System Implementation Worldwide: A Successful Multidecadal Research-To-Operations Effort

Abstract: At the beginning of the twenty-first century a research-to-operations program was initiated to design and develop operational systems to support local forecasters in their challenging task to provide advance warning for flash floods worldwide. Twenty-some years later, the Flash Flood Guidance System with global coverage provides real-time assessment and guidance products to more than 60 countries, serving nearly 3 billion people. The implementation domains cover a wide range of hydroclimatological, geomorphological, and land-use regimes worldwide. This flexible and evolving system combines meteorology and hydrology data and concepts as well as supports product utility for flash flood disaster mitigation on very large scales with high spatial and temporal resolution. Through quality control procedures, it integrates remotely sensed data of land surface precipitation and of land surface properties from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellite platforms, reflectivity data from a variety of weather radar systems, and asynchronous precipitation data from ground-based automated precipitation gauges in order to produce assessments and short-term forecasts that support forecasters and disaster managers in real time. For each region, it also integrates mesoscale meteorological model forecasts with land surface model response to produce longer-term guidance products. It contains components and interfaces that allow real-time forecaster adjustments to products based on local last-minute field information and relevant forecaster experience. Assessments of utility for flash flood warning operations by national forecasting agencies worldwide are positive. The article exemplifies the process of realization and evolution of the Flash Flood Guidance System (FFGS) from research in interdisciplinary fields to operations in diverse environments, and discusses lessons learned. Georgakakos, K. P., Modrick, T. M., Shamir, E., Campbell, R., Cheng, Z., Jubach, R., Sperfslage, J. A., Spencer, C. R., & Banks, R. (2022). The Flash Flood Guidance System Implementation Worldwide: A Successful Multidecadal Research-to-Operations Effort, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 103(3), E665-E679. Retrieved Mar 31, 2022, from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/3/BAMS-D-20-0241.1.xml     Download ()