Author(s)

S. Gottwald & P. Antoch

Abstract

Recent flood events across Europe have resulted in the development of new applications for high water situations. Real-time environmental monitoring systems prove increasingly valuable while meteorological conditions are changing worldwide. The 2005 and 2006 floods in southern and eastern Germany showed the importance of fast reaction in civil protection. The period needed for alerting the public can be significantly cut by real-time systems. These have to be embedded in a communication infrastructure with clearly defined responsibilities, short information paths, and the acceptance of contemporary technologies to help mitigate the disastrous impacts of floods. Keywords: flood prevention, civil protection, forecasting, alert system, monitoring system, real-time information delivery, communication infrastructure. 1 Introduction High water situations are getting more and more threatening since they occur more and more frequently. Therefore people today are interested in water levels near their home. But it has to be pointed out, that the public view is much more focussed on large rivers and places which are more or less famous or wellknown. However, high water is much more dangerous along small river basins as the period of time between an intense rain and the appearance of a flash flood amounts to just a few hours. So public services have not only to take care about physical flood protection but also the awareness of people near such small rivers, which never thought about rising water levels ten times higher than they were usually.

Keywords

flood prevention, civil protection, forecasting, alert system, monitoring system, real-time information delivery, communication infrastructure.