Flood Foresight, by JBA Consulting, is a globally-scalable strategic flood forecasting system, providing data on rainfall severity, flood inundation footprints and depth, and flood impact estimates up to 10-days ahead of fluvial flood events. Datasets are updated at up to three hours’ frequency and allow rapid loss estimation for current and forecast flood states, supporting decision-making before, during, and after major flood events.
Working with this technology, civil society actors can proactively manage disaster risks to reduce human and economic costs. Designed to be compatible with existing business intelligence and decision support tools, Flood Foresight supports operational flood management in the infrastructure, insurance, utilities, and civil contingencies sectors.
Flood Foresight is an innovative system that leverages available technologies to offer disaster risk management to humanitarian organisations and other civil society actors. Fluvial forecasts are translated into a hazard map that informs the end user of where human and economic risk exposures are most significant.
An example of disaster risk financing project was for the Indus River basin, Pakistan. JBA were tasked with developing an operation fluvial flood forecasting model which can predict the number of people who will be inundated by fluvial flood events of different extremes.
JBA were able to draw on several existing models and datasets to deploy an initial flood impact forecasting system within two months of project initiation. For forecasting population impacts, we coupled the Copernicus Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) with our Flood Foresight technology to generate daily probabilistic forecasts of flood inundation extents and depths. From these digital maps the population at riskcan be estimated in the short, medium and long-term.
Successful projects such as this, demonstrate technology already exists that can inform of real time flood risks globally, which when utilised has the potential to drastically reduce human and economic consequences of events forecast by meteorological systems.