Urban Flood Warning System with wireless technology: Case Study of Dhaka City - Bangladesh

Nayeema Nazneen Naz

April 2006

Abstract

The principal objective of this study is to design and develop an integrated urban flood warning system to identify the flood threats and disseminate the warning information through Internet and mobile phone. It can help to reduce the flood damage and to take immediate measures in flood prone areas.

Flood is a natural phenomenon in Bangladesh. Each year the country experiences massive damages from flooding from the three large rivers: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna, which together with other 230 rivers drain water from the Himalayan to the Bay of Bengal. Besides the country has average 2300 mm precipitation whereas 80% of the annual rainfall occurs between July and September. These rivers and/or high local rainfall during the monsoon period are major reasons of floods. Complete flood control strategy is not a feasible option for its geographical context as it is deltaic land. After some severe flood in 1988, in 1998 some non-structural measures (which reduce the impact of floods) became popular for flood mitigation. The flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FF& WC) of Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) is trying to develop/update flood forecasting and warning systems with advanced modelling and data integration to give advance information to the flood prone areas. Still they have problem in transmission or dissemination of flood warning to people before flood occurs.

The main task of this study is to develop a web based demonstrator of urban flood warning system from the simulation result of urban drainage model (MOUSE, a product of Danish Hydraulic Institute – DHI) and its quick transmission to the mobile phone users. The study was done on a case study of one business area of Dhaka, Bangladesh. To develop a demonstrator of urban flood warning system DHI-developed MOUSE model are used for the existing urban drainage network of the study area based on the real time data taken from one rainfall station of the city. From simulation result of the pipe network system flood points are located on the map with the corresponding flood depth. A web based set-up named Urban Flood Warning System is developed which takes the result from the MOUSE simulation result file and creates individual maps for all the flooded nodes with corresponding flood depths. To make the flooded nodes more significant to the people, this information is linked to nearer distinguishing landmark picture. This web system also displays the MOUSE model generated flood map, node water level for all nodes, user manual of the demonstrator, technical description of the system etc. While this system is accessible by the users of the World Wide Web, at the same time the flood information can be transmitted to the mobile phone users. Mobile phone users receive simple text message about the coming flood, which might be free of cost. If the user is more interested to get detailed information s/he can access the detailed flood information via the mobile phone. The display of detailed flood information of the coming flood is very similar to the information provided in web-based Urban Flood Warning System.

All flood related information from the developed system (model set up and simulation results) is stored in central web server. The system is developed by using the JAVA programming language (Servlet technology for the server side and MIDlet technology for transmission to mobile phones).

Keywords: Flood, Warning, Rainfall, Rain gauge, River, Radar, Pipe, Network, Drainage, Urban, Storm water, System, Mobile phone, Wireless, Server, Webpage, Model, MOUSE, Simulation, Java, Servlet, MIDlet, JVM, FF & WC, GrameenPhone, NGO

Back to the list of MSc abstracts