Five Principles to Guide You When Developing a Flood Early Warning System

AEM Water Sector Leader James Logan provides a five-step cyclical process for developing, maintaining, and continuously improving flood early warning systems. This framework is consistent with recommendations from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Step 1 is risk knowledge, building an understanding of what hazards might occur in your area, who and where they might impact, and generally speaking, what's at risk. That means understanding the floodplain, areas of development, and key infrastructure.

Step 2 is monitoring & forecasting, where you build a clear historical and real-time profile of your area to understand risks more fully using rain gauges, stream gauges, radar, and beyond. By combining forecasts and monitoring data, you can understand your current state and recognize risks and hazards as they develop.

Step 3 is dissemination & communication, where you take the monitoring and forecast data and pass it along to relevant stakeholders while there's still time to act on it. In some situations, that might mean communicating directly with the public. In others, you might be handing of information to an emergency management team. Either way, it's key to have clear, actionable information and for the communication pathways to be open.

Step 4 is response capability; that's where all the forecast intelligence and water data turn into action. As a major storm or flood event plays out, you need emergency managers, public works professionals, first responders, local leaders, and beyond to play their part in keeping everybody safe and minimizing damage. A good response requires a clear action plan and the right alerts to initiate the plan.

Step 5 is evaluation & improvement, which should be carried out after each major storm or flood event. The goal is for the system to work better each time it's used. That means looking at what went right, what went wrong, and what information you didn't have might've been useful in the moment.

This is Lesson 1 in our unit focusing on Flood Early Warning Systems. Lesson 2 will focus on the Risk Knowledge phase at length.