National project · Floods

Flood2now

Flood forecasting and prevention systems that include citizen science

About the project

Flood2now is a project that aims to boost the development of flood forecasting and prevention systems that include citizen science.

Flood2Now aims to improve early warning systems for flood risk from a multidisciplinary perspective. It uses historical information and citizen science as part of the relevant data for testing its models.

Flood2now has two pilots: the River Arga and the River Francolí.

The River Arga is in Navarre, in northern Spain, and has a catchment area of 510 km². This pilot was chosen because the Arga has flooded frequently in recent years as it flows through Pamplona. Flood2Now also has rainfall and river flow data recorded every 15 minutes.

The River Francolí is a torrential river with a total catchment of 838 km², a length of 60 km and a mean annual flow of 1.2 m³/s at its mouth in Tarragona. Vulnerability and exposure are high, both because of the towns the river passes through and because of the historic heritage and critical infrastructure in the catchment. In this pilot catchment, Flood2Now will develop decision-support tools and improved early warning, based on meteorological and hydrological data and models, as well as impact data. This work will be complemented by data collection through citizen science activities.

Project objectives

Flood2Now is a university / business / social foundation partnership with an R&D&I focus that includes:

The role of Ibercivis

In this project, Fundación Ibercivis coordinates the work package on gathering information relevant to the project through citizen science. The aim of this task is to identify and engage stakeholders, so as to improve the communication of flood risk to the general public and reach a critical mass of participants for the citizen science campaigns, in order to encourage the generation of

crowdsourced data to complement official hydrological measurements.