There haven’t been global efforts to identify and determine global flood risk areas and consistently support first responders in the event of a flood, although flooding impacts over half a billion people every year. The lack of objective knowledge of the impact of flooding after the fact, first relief agency assistance is often constrained and therefore less effective. However, these humanitarian catastrophes could be reduced with better transformation of existing observational and modeling technologies into information useful to local populations and decision makers.
Here I present a state-of-the-art mobile, globally-scoped, flood prediction, monitoring capabilities and risk evaluations platform that includes high resolution flood information to better serve local needs. The platform builds upon already available NASA-supported global flood systems, including the DFO - Flood Observatory satellite-based hydrological gauging stations, UMD Global Flood Monitoring System (GFMS) and have these integrated with the European Commission’s GloFAS, and SAR-based high-resolution flood mapping.