30 October 2014

SITGAP2 - MANAGEMENT, ALARM AND EVACUATION SYSTEM FOR LOCARNO AND VALLEMAGGIA CIVIL PROTECTION


An early warning system for lake flooding in support of civil protection

Object of the Study:
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW SOLUTIONS FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EASY-TO-UPDATE SYSTEM SUPPORTING CIVIL PROTECTION ACTIVITIES

Several studies on predict an increase in high-intensity precipitations in Europe, which is likely increase the frequency and magnitude of flood events.



Early warning systems (EWS) are used for predicting, communicating, and responding to floods. An existing EWS was renewed to meet new requirements. The new system design was based on the Service Oriented Architecture pattern. Open source software was used throughout the system. Open source approach was found desirable for several reasons: cost reduction, independence from proprietary policies, the right to access and modify the source code, and because of the good support provided by the open source software community.


The SITGAP RESTful web API are developed in Python language and rely on Tornado Web Server [1] which is capable to handle a large number of clients at the same time. The requests and responses use the JSON open standard format. The data store is the PostgreSQL with the PostGIS extension.

The interface was developed using Sencha Ext JS [2] and orchestrates the services to provide the desired business logic of the application. It integrates hydro- meteorological data concerning the areas surrounding the Verbano basin, it runs a conceptual hydrological model that combines the collected data and high- resolution meteorological forecasting to forecast lake level, and dispatches alerts to local stakeholder. 



Hydro-meteorological data are collected and managed in real-time thanks to the usage of the SOS standard by means of two istSOS [3] platform which serve more than 240 sensors and 30 million of observations coming from the monitoring networks of Canton Ticino, MetwoSwiss, Swiss Federal Environmental Office, Piemonte Region Environmental Agency and Lombardy Region Great Lake Consortium. 



The hydrological model is a SCS-CN-based conceptual model that applies the Nash method. It is activated in case of meteorological alert only. Every model run, after a first phase of calibration based on measured observations collected from the istSOS services, it provides 72 hours lake level forecasts by using COSMO-7 meteorological model [4] rainfall outputs by MeteoSwiss and elaborated thanks to a local WPS service.