Advancements in Rainfall Predictions & Flood Forecasting

Joint event between;

Stormwater Queensland & Engineers Australia, Queensland Division, Water Panel

Date:  Thursday 6th September, 2018

Time:  1pm – 5pm (Registration opens 12.30pm)

Location:  Hawken Auditorium, Engineering House

Flood Forecasting requires underlying systems and techniques that has applications within various parts of the water industry. While the Bureau of Meteorology is the official flood forecasting agency, they work in close co-operation with related agencies who manage emergency response and/or water resources. This requires systems that take in real-time data and provide robust and quality controlled data to decision makers. Flood forecasting systems are a rapidly advancing, highly innovative field solving unique problems.  

This event will provide a range of presenters from the industry including: 

• Seqwater (Lindsay Millard)
• Bureau of Meteorology (Sue Oates & Jonty Hall)
• Ipswich City Council (Adam Berry & Matthew Pinder)
• Water Technology (Alister Daly)

The event will highlight and showcase how some of the different forecasting systems across organisations are being used and their linkages.  You will get to see firsthand how different authorities respond to actual flood events and how they work together in Qld – it is a peek into something quite unique and exciting.  A range of different forecasting and meteorological products ranging from basic to complex will also be demonstrated within multiple flood forecasting systems. 

BoM will provide a presentation on their new, current and future products.  This presentation will include information on their HyFS [Delft-FEWS] system and a general overview on the development phase STEPS and Rainfields products and how these have been incorporated into a trial flash flood forecasting system at Ipswich City Council.   Furthermore, an insight into how an Emergency Management Response team would utilise some of this data in an actual flood event will be provided 

Seqwater will demonstrate the real-time data exchange between the modelling systems occurring between BoM’s HyFS and SeqFEWS [Delft-FEWS flood warning systems. The quality control of the rain and flow gauge datafeeds that inform the models will also be presented. 

A method in which radar rainfall is utilised by flood modellers will also be showcased in an example of how to calibrate flood events using a radar rainfall calibration approach. 

This promises to be an event full of new information, practice and innovation in an emerging and exciting space in floodplain management.

Event facilitated by Daniel Niven (Engineers Australia Water Panel and Stormwater Qld Committee Member)