In 2008, myanmar/burma suffered 138,000 fatalities from tropical storm nargis. Approximately 260,000 people were made homeless; an estimated 90 95% of the buildings in the delta were lost. One cause…

This is a $549,631.41 research and development grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to The Regents of the University of Colorado, doing business as the University of Colorado Office of Contracts and Grants Division, a U.S. state government entity and institution of higher learning. The grant, which was not set aside, aims to develop and publish global flood forecasting, flood alerts, and flood impact assessments to improve flood risk monitoring and response capabilities. The effort integrates NASA-based global flood systems, including the Dartmouth Flood Observatory's RiverWatch, the University of Maryland's Global Flood Monitoring System, and the NASA Goddard Automated MODIS Flood Product, among others. The University of Colorado will collaborate with the Global Flood Partnership to build connections to local end users. The resulting products will be made available through web pages, map services, and an integrated global flood record archive. This grant supports NASA's Disaster Response Portal and contributes to the Group on Earth Observations' Global Flood Risk Monitoring initiative.

In 2008, myanmar/burma suffered 138,000 fatalities from tropical storm nargis. Approximately 260,000 people were made homeless; an estimated 90 95% of the buildings in the delta were lost. One cause of the nargis catastrophe was the lack of communication of the storm warning directly to the inhabitants. As weather professionals in the outside world watched the storm, the local population was largely unaware of their peril. Another cause was the lack of flood risk knowledge in the increasingly heavily populated delta areas. Post-flood assistance was then constrained by lack of prompt, objective knowledge of storm impact. The humanitarian catastrophe could have been reduced, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved, with better transformation of existing observational and modeling technologies into information useful to local populations and decision makers. The lesson is relevant to many nations: on a global basis,>50 severely damaging floods occur each year. As a contribution to the GEO element "global flood risk monitoring", our efforts are directed towards producing state-of-the-art, globally-scoped, flood prediction, monitoring capabilities and risk evaluations, continuing to automate wherever possible the systems and how they are linked together, and, finally, directly addressing the needed connections to multiple end users that provide them with useful information. The focus will be on integrating aspects of NASA-based global flood systems, including DFO river watch, UMD global flood monitoring system (gfms), the NASA goddard automated modis flood product, and SAR-based flood mapping. We plan three year s work to develop and publish, in graphical views via web pages and as WMS/WCS/WFS and/or arcgis image data services, global flood forecasting, flood alerts, and flood impact assessments. These will be provided as static data products (e.g. web page displays) and as dynamic map services. We also plan an archiving system, in collaboration with the global flood partnership, so that each new event becomes part of an integrated global flood record. We will continue to work in close collaboration with the global flood partnership, which is a participating organization within GEO, to build the needed connection to the local level. DFO will provide the web portal/integration facility; in which these automated systems and their data and services are assembled and the final information products published. The results will also be communicated directly to a NASA disaster response portal when this becomes available. DFO is actively collaborating with several global-scale end user organizations: 1) the world food program, 2) the world bank, 3) the international red cross/red crescent, 4) the european commission s global disaster alert and coordination system, and 5) the geosur project (for latin america).