Hydroinformatics

On rivers-list, Azin Amini writes:

It is our pleasure to introduce you the online river forecast system “swissrivers.ch”. The website provides forecast for river flows as well as lake and dam reservoir levels in whole Switzerland.

The forecasts are updated two times per day for the next 30 hours. The data is available for 2500 catchment areas, 1500 rivers, as well as 60 lakes and reservoirs.  With the intuitive geographic interface, access to the information is particularly user friendly.

The forecast calculations are performed in e-dric.ch office using the RS3.0 software, an in-house program of the company.

In addition to the real-time hydrological forecast, the swissrivers.ch system provides a platform for hydrological analysis of all Swiss catchment areas. It allows efficient computation of indicators such as average discharges, flood discharges, low water levels and water regimes. It can also be used for the analysis of climate change impacts.

You can check it out on www.swissrivers.ch

Here’s a screenshot:

Screenshot of swissrivers.ch

To get to a chart like that, you need to zoom in two levels then click on the site. The last step doesn’t work in the Chrome browser.

Via the LinkedIn “Flood Professionals” group: Halcrow have released a Flood Alert app for the iPhone (an Android version is promised):

This flood warning application allows users to get real time updates on flood warnings near them, at locations important to them and for the rest of England and Wales.

I’m intrigued by this. I’ll certainly install the app and give it a go (it’s free, after all) but I struggle to imagine a native app as a good way of disseminating flood warnings. During an event an app could provide a useful tool for those struggling to deal with the flood (but only those with supported phones, and only until they get wet), but I’m not entirely convinced about that either.

Note that I’m all for more dissemination and better interfaces. It’s the choice of native apps for particular types of smartphones that I wonder about.

I’m intrigued as to whether this comment implies Agency commitment or just optimism on the part of the developers:

Additional feeds for rainfall, river levels and sea conditions will also be included within Flood Alert once made available by the Environment Agency.

I also wonder what the relationship with the Environment Agency is – did they provide any funding for this or is it a Halcrow venture? And if so, what’s the business model?

Dragan Savic has established a LinkedIn group for discussion of Hydroinformatics. That group replaces the mailing lists that were available, briefly, at hydroinformatics-community.com.

Join us to discuss development, implementation and evaluation of hydroinformatics tools, conference activities and any other topics related to the hydroinformatics community.

The old web hydroinformatics community web site has been stagnating for a while. I found that all the time I had to do anything with it was taken up just keeping it running. There also isn’t enough information being posted to justify the complex structure of news, events, jobs, etc.

So, let’s try a different approach. Just a simple weblog. Anything of interest to the community can be posted, and posts will be displayed, in the usual weblog manner, in reverse chronological order.