A Cost-Effective Flood Warning System for Small Urban Basins

Abstract

An effective warning system for flash floods along the upper River des Peres, a small urban stream in eastern Missouri, USA, is based on three enterprise-level, automated rain gauges. Because floods in this 25 km² basin develop rapidly and are commonly caused by small but intense thunderstorm cells, these rain gauges were necessarily deployed within the watershed, and immediate telemetry and processing of rainfall delivered in 5-minute intervals is required. Available data show that damaging floods in this area occur only 30 min to 3 h following the delivery of 38 mm of rainfall or more in a single hour. Water levels along this stream can rise more than 3 m/h. Since full deployment in Nov. 2021, our system has successfully predicted 3 significant floods with one false positive.

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