Overview

The approach taken by waterRIDE™ in flood forecasting focuses on leveraging readily available data (hydraulic modelling results, digital elevation models, property GIS datasets, critical infrastructure GIS datasets etc) to provide an indication of likely flood behaviour and, often more importantly, the consequences (or affectation) of such flooding on the community and emergency management efforts.

The highly visual nature of waterRIDE™, combined with it’s intuitive interfaces and unique capabilities, provides an ideal platform for the distribution and management of flood related information.

From technical users requiring detailed access to flood modelling parameters, to users requiring more general access to the affectation of that flooding, waterRIDE™ makes sharing flood information in a quality controlled way, easy.

Sharing Flood Data Summary

The ability to combine spatial and non-spatial data provides a comprehensive means of facilitating access to flood related datasets such as:

  • Design flood surfaces and model results (the full time series of level, depth, velocity, VxD, Hazard etc)
  • Flood planning surface information (minimum floor level surface)
  • Flood forecast information distribution
  • Seamless flood surfaces across multiple catchments/types of flooding (river, storm surge, overland flow etc)
  • Historical flood information, including photos, movies and recorded levels
  • Reports
  • Planning and development control information (reports, GIS layers etc)
  • Intranet web pages

Generally, to develop a flood data management system with waterRIDE™, the following minimum datasets are required:

  • Flood model outputs (1D or 2D) (for a full list of supported model types, refer to the waterRIDE™ FLOOD Managerproduct pages)

 

To prepare a flood data management system providing access to flood modelling results, the following additional datasets are recommended:

  • Aerial photography
  • A terrain model (DEM), usually at a finer scale than the flood model – as either a TIN or a grid
  • Basic GIS layers for reference/context (eg land parcels, roads etc)

 

To prepare a fully integrated flood data management system, the following datasets will add to the richness of the system:

  • Key property, critical infrastructure and evacuation route GIS datasets for integration with the model datasets to help distribute information on the affectation of flooding
  • Historical photos and flood level recording
  • Historical flood recordings, converted into a representative flood surface
  • Flood study reports
  • Planning control documents and GIS layers
  • Photos of key parts of the catchment
  • Automated flood certificates base datasets

 

A waterRIDE™ based flood data management system can be readily setup using:

  • waterRIDE™ FLOOD Manager
  • waterRIDE™ FLOOD Viewer

waterRIDE™ FLOOD Manager would be used to setup the waterRIDE™ projects and control what information will be made available to various users, whilst waterRIDE™ FLOOD Viewer provides “read-only” access to waterRIDE™ projects across an organisation.

Details on the above products can be found in the “products” pages.