An operational open source approach for watersheds delimitation and characterization based on digital images and geographical databases

Abstract

Since natural disasters may cause big human and material losses, the Brazilian government are specially interested in ways to avoid it. Among these ways, the use of computational technologies are specially interesting for monitoring and warning population about such disasters. At this work we present an approach, developed at the Brazilian National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), for watershed areas delimitation and characterization, based on digital images and geographical databases, using only open source tools. The proposed approach achieves consistent and useful results on operation environment, providing a significant helping for disasters management. Finally, we present some examples of delimited and characterized watersheds, in different regions of Brazil, including one in the Amazon rainforest area. The presented approach is already operational at the situation room in CEMADEN.

An operational dynamical neuro-forecasting model for hydrological disasters

“…Particularly for this study, the ANN was trained to perform level forecasts in the Grande River. Once the point of interest for level forecasts in Grande River was set, a GIS-based procedure (Carvalho et al 2015) could be applied to define the watershed upstream of the point. The hydrological stations of the watershed selected through this GIS-based procedure provided the input data to the ANNbased hydrological forecast.…”

An Open Source Approach for Watershed's Delimitation to Support Flood Monitoring

“…Concerning the need of efficient tools to help experts on their task, this work proposes a methodological approach to delimitate watersheds using open source software. It is based upon the idea that the Structure Watershed Area (WSA) is a fundamental tool to support flood monitoring systems (Carvalho et al, 2015). Our goal is to provide a detailed methodological approach, exclusively based on open-data and open software, for watershed delimitation and characterization in the context of flood monitoring.…”