WATEREMPIRE - Space Apps Challenge

WATEREMPIRE| A Flood of Ideas

A Flood of Ideas

Your challenge is to develop a new methodology or algorithm that leverages Earth observation and critical infrastructure datasets to estimate damages to infrastructure caused by flooding. Make a measurable impact on the resilience of nations by helping the Earth observations community contribute to the United Nations’ primary effort to reduce disaster risk!

How much does a flood cost?

Summary

Our project is based on two specific factors: the infrastructural damage and the early detection of hazards. We are going to achieve this in this way: we are going to receive data from Earth Observations (EO) and this data will tell us the damage that could occur to a city, state, etc. This data will be acquired further on.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a methodology to calculate the cost of infrastructure damage caused by a flood in an anticipated way.

It is important because floods are by far the most common natural disaster and for the most deaths recorded worldwide.

We hope to create an algorithm that will tell us about the damages that a flood may cause on a country, state, city, etc; before the hazard arrives at that place.

This algorithm is going to receive information from Earth observations (EO) and this information will tell the people about the damages that the flood could cause (damages to the infrastructure and economic losses)

The method consists of three steps – the secretariat highlights challenges in each step.

Step 1: Collect good quality data on physical damage and disruptions by the disaster.

Step 2: Calculate the number of times a disruption happens and the number of

facilities and units damaged, based on source data.

Step 3: Convert the number of disruptions relative to the population, calculating the number of disruptions per 100,000.

How We Developed This Project

Flood has a negative impact on the normal functioning of the society, leaving vulnerable to poor people and poor cities. Therefore, we’d like to find a way to help society and improve their quality of life.

Our approach to developing the project was the infrastructure and the target D from the Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction.

One of the principal problems was that we've got too much information and technical knowledge is required to manage and understand this kind of data. Also, the way of working remotely was a really big challenge.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used standards and metadata for disaster-related statistical data and analysis. provided by Earhdatha and Desiventar Senda, purpose in a Technical Guidance for Monitoring and Reporting on Progress in Achieving the Global Targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

Earth Observations (EO) from NASA were used as information sources, using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) these datasets are collected, formatted and dumped on our database.

Once we have our data warehouse, we can focus on designing the algorithm because all the relevant information was gathered in one place,therefore, this makes the data easy to visualize and analyze.