Prévision des crues de l'Amazone à Manaus

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The capital city of Brazil's Amazonas state, Manaus (1.2 million inhabitants), is particularly exposed to the amazonian river system floods. The considerable extent of the possible submersions, due to an extremely flat topography and to the very high water levels that can be reached, has motivated the development of a forecasting tool for the flood stages in Manaus. Given the characteristics of this unique river system and the available data records, the statistiscal approach has been chosen and several techniques have been tested (regression, PLS, neural nets); an appropriate procedure for handling missing data has also been developed. The forecast equations established for various lead times (up to 60 days) have been integrated into the CHEIAMAZ operational software, which should soon be coupled with an automatic system of real-time data acquisition.