The rate of rise of floodwaters is an important dynamic of flooding to comprehend for effective emergency planning and risk assessment. Many of us appreciate that rate of rise is how fast floodwaters are rising, but do we all appreciate there is not a single rate of rise parameter?
There are different "rates" that may provide better contextual intelligence than others. For example, it may be more important to understand not how fast the river is rising, but how quickly a part of the floodplain is inundated once inundation commences.
Common rates of rise that can be readily analysed include:
To add further sophistication to your query, you may wish to refine the time over which the analysis is carried out. For example:
Combining the various types of rise with the refinement parameters can let you do some quite powerful combination analysis, such as "once floodwaters start to rise at a location, how long is it until they are at least 1m deep?".
Even better, with waterRIDE you can do this analysis across the entire floodplain, not just at specific points providing a quantitative understanding of rates of rise everywhere as shown in the figure below.
You can find the Rate of Rise analysis tools in the Flood Intelligence section of the Analyse panel.
Total amount of rise over the first 1 hour.
waterRIDE CLOUD was released 6 months ago in the midst of nation/world-wide COVID19 lockdowns. Since then we've been using Cloud on a daily basis as we continue to largely work from home. We've compiled a list of what we've been enjoying about waterRIDE CLOUD, as fairly heavy users:
Whilst we've listed some of the positives, the biggest negative we've encountered is internet access. Obviously, if your data is on the cloud you need internet to access it. Whilst we've found the cloud platform itself to be very stable, some of the team live in rural areas with "lower grade" (polite) internet services which has led to many a phone hotspot being used in anger.
It does highlight a salient point, if you are running "mission critical" systems on the cloud, such as a flood forecasting system, you should ensure you have a backup that can be run locally. That leads to another positive, the one waterRIDE framework means you can have the same setup running in waterRIDE Classic from a battery powered laptop, should complete disaster strike. Food for thought.
See our FAQ's for more information.
Sharing flood information without transferring any data: If you missed our recent webinar, you can watch a recording of the event here. The webinar, presented by Cameron Druery, explored ways in which flooding information can be shared and communicated via the cloud without any transfer of datasets. The primary message of the webinar was that the transfer of understanding is key, rather than the transfer of information.
waterRIDE CLOUD Launch: In this webinar, Cameron Druery showed what waterRIDE CLOUD is all about as well as delved into some of the philosophy behind it's design and where waterRIDE is headed. You can watch a replay here.
As 2020 draws to a close, we look forward to taking a well-earnt break. Our offices (well, the study door at least) will be closed from COB 23rd December and reopen on 4th January, 2021.
We wish everyone a safe and relaxing break, and look forward to working with you in the new year!