New platform to make flood forecasting 3 hours faster: NSC

When a natural disaster happens due to heavy rain, it is not merely a town or a city that suffers, the whole river basin is damaged as well, said Chen Cheng-hung, vice chairman of NSC, during a press conference. NSC aspired to establish an integrated platform to monitor the various conditions of river basins under different circumstances, aiming at winning more time for rescue staff to respond, Chen added.

In light of the frequent incidents of many rivers quickly overflowing their banks during downpours and causing damages, authorities have been trying to integrate cross-domain results. After three years of research, mainly on northern Taiwan's Dansui River, they successfully established the forecast platform, which combines the facilities and observational data of weather bureau and Water Resources Agency (WRA), said Tsai Hui-feng, an official from National Applied Research Laboratories.

The importance of this platform is that it can carry out meta-analysis during heavy rains, as cooperating with weather bureau's rainfall forecasting, it can predict a possible flood three hours ahead, Tsai pointed out.

For example, said Hung Ming-chien, head of WRA, once the weather bureau forecasts the figures of water volume in Wulai mountainous areas for the next three hours, the data will appear on the water level forecast platform within 10 minutes. It can fast analyze how the related water level will change and whether it will reach a warning level, Hung added.

Also, through instant surveillance camera, the integrated platform can fully monitor the situations as to help authorities, experts, scholars and rescue crew make quick decisions.

This project, costing NT$3 million annually, now preliminarily focuses on Dansui River, and will be further implemented for other major rivers in near future, according to Tsai.

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