Scientific, technical and institutional challenges towards next-generation operational flood risk management decision support systems

ABSTRACT

The global dissemination of operational systems for flood forecasting, early warning and risk management is much more heterogeneous than comparable forecasting services found in the meteorological community. This results primarily from the need for local ‘on-the-ground’ knowledge, such as addressing regional hydrological phenomena or the impact of local water resources management, and the challenge for small or weak institutions to integrate and operate such sophisticated systems. In this paper, we summarize and discuss the state-of-the-art of this kind of systems from a scientific, technical and institutional perspective and provide some recent applications. This leads to the development of an improved integration approach of existing building blocks and cross-organizational collaboration aimed at defining a next-generation flood risk management approach. The approach is implemented through the combination of a general platform with a community-driven effort, which substantially relies on local expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Flood risk management
• cross-organizational collaboration
• institutional frameworks
• decision-making
• uncertainty
• hydrological modelling

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous referees for their suggestions that have contributed to improving the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Completely unsupervised systems according to an ‘out-of-the-loop’ approach do not frequently occur in the water resources domain due to the large variety of water systems and their characteristics as well as the remaining need for expert judgement.