FloodMapp NowCast - Queensland
Situational awareness during a flood emergency
FloodMapp NowCast provides hyper local, rapid, highly precise flood insights in real time.
In the 2020/2021 wet season in Queensland, FloodMapp NowCast was deployed at state-wide scale across Queensland and delivered to Queensland Fire and Emergency Services’ (QFES) ArcGIS online portal.
On March 17, 2021 the town of Sapphire in Central Queensland suffered a significant flood event, with Retreat Creek rising 10m in a matter of hours. The flood warning siren as part of the flood warning system in the town failed to sound, and residents awoke to major flooding with little warning. Moreover, as the town is remotely located and without strong mobile signals, emergency services were largely unaware that the town was experiencing a potentially serious flood event.
This covered 23 river basins including 1,700 catchments and was configured as a Web Map Service. FloodMapp supported QFES over that summer with real-time, highly accurate flood mapping for use in the State Disaster Coordination Centre during flood events.
On the morning of the flood event, QFES received notification that a member of the public was in distress, advising their home has been flooded to the roof and they needed emergency assistance.
Poor mobile coverage meant QFES lost contact with this person part way through the call. The full circumstances had not been established and they were unsure what type of service was required, for example: was a rescue helicopter rescue required to lift the person from a rooftop.
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QFES had access to FloodMapp NowCast which provided a real time mapping of the flood extent. As QFES had pinpointed the location of the failed call, NowCast real-time inundation mapping data was used to quickly determine that the caller was well away from the floodwaters and could be accessed and recovered by road.
This vital intelligence in real-time enhanced decision making and ultimately saved tasking a specialist rescue helicopter when none was needed. The rescue helicopter then continued to be available for high priority tasking and saved significant time and cost.
Importantly, in this example, FloodMapp modelling operated to fulfill the gap in situational awareness that could not be derived from probability-based static flood inundation maps. On the ground validation demonstrated FloodMapp performed with a high degree of accuracy.
The value of FloodMapp Nowcast in providing QFES with vital situational awareness of the flood impact in real-time was crystal clear. Data driven decision making removed significant uncertainty. The real-time modelling provided successfully underpinned the most efficient, effective and safest dispatch solution for emergency services.
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NowCast is powered by FloodMapp’s proprietary real-time and scalable hydraulic modelling system DASH. DASH works by ingesting tidal and river height data from partners including the Bureau of Meteorology and Department of Natural Resources (Queensland). This then powers NowCast to compute hydraulic models at the highest resolution available up to 1m across an area. NowCast generates updates of flood extent data as a raster format, and is available as an integration on ArcGIS online. In this example models are updated hourly as this is when river gauge data is refreshed.