I can’t see any statement on the web site about licensing, nor do either of the words “licence” and “license” appear in the engine source code. Public Domain?

Agreed.

“I wonder if this feed from the flood forecasting system is available to other consultants or organisations?”

And at what cost?

“I suppose ideally if you receive a flood warning, you should be able to immediately view a predicted flood map for the same area, on the same device.”

One simple and effective way to do that is to embed a (shortened) web link in a text message. All devices that have app capability have a web browser (some better, some worse, most getting better with each release). Those who do have such a phone can just select the link and open the web page. Those who don’t would have to go to a computer to look, but would at least have the information included in the message. The web page should be optimised for mobile browsers, perhaps with device-specific optimisations for popular/high spec devices but certainly with a simple fall back for low spec web-enabled devices.

The app is only useful if it is installed. Downloading and installing is cumbersome and best done ahead of time. A website is useful as soon as you receive a link to it (if you have a data connection – but the app is no use without that either).

Text messaging is very close to universal, with voice messages able to reach most of the rest of the population.

An app doesn’t itself solve the polling problem. Push notifications could be argued to, but they are (even) less reliable than texts in my experience (my experience with texts is that Orange quite frequently doesn’t deliver them for 24 hours or more, which is a problem for emergency notifications).

App-based push notifications, texts and voice messaging services alike exchange the polling problem for a subscription problem: how do you get people to sign up for the notification service. It should at least in theory be possible to deliver texts to all phones that are switched on in an affected area.

Hamish

Similar flood warning information has been available to the public for some time: river and stream levels in the USA, river-reach based warning in the UK, and full predicted flood maps in Flanders. But all of these depend on the public polling a website themselves. Emergency services have been able to receive text warnings on their mobile phones.

So I think this is a genuine advance in that it is free to the public and the content ought to be well presented. It won’t be long before the majority of people in developed countries will carry similar devices, so this sort of application will be available to many more people in the future.

I suppose ideally if you receive a flood warning, you should be able to immediately view a predicted flood map for the same area, on the same device.

David