Improving Flooding Forecast in Real Time Using the Integration between Weather Radar and Raingages: Case Study

This paper aims to show how the integration between weather radar and rain gages is able to improve the flooding forecast in the megacity of São Paulo. The city of São Paulo is one of the five largest cities in the world. However, this megacity has a chronic flood problem that occurs every year, especially during the summer. Structural measures for flood control are extremely expensive and not possible in short term. In this scenario, non-structural measures such as a flood warning system is an alternative solution. This system aims to provide a real-time forecast of floods that may cause impacts in several areas. The accuracy of flooding forecast in real time is extremely important for a good result. Precipitation is the main forcing in this process and has to be estimated properly. Rain gauge networks can represent rainfall locally but has a bad spatial representativeness. Weather radars provide very high spatial resolution but not so good accuracy for rainfall intensity. The integration of radar estimations with rain gauge network is capable to minimize errors of both. The goal of the present work is to evaluate the performance of a methodology to merge weather radar estimates with rain gauge data and it uses as an input in a distributed hydrologic model. For the integration, it was used São Paulo weather radar a rain gage network. The hydrological simulations were performed with the distributed model SWMM. The studied area was the Mandaqui Basin, in the city of São Paulo.

Artigo retirado do site: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/9780784482339.018

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