Flood Chasers: a crowdsourced data project for flash flood events quantification

PATALANO, A.; GUILLÉN, N.; GARCÍA, C. M.

Durham

Conferencia; HYDRAULIC MEASUREMENTS & EXPERIMENTAL METHODS CONFERENCE; 2017

American Society of Civil Engineers

The researchers of the National University of Córdoba have developed and implemented the Flood Chasers Project (?Cazadores de crecidas? in Spanish) to populate a database of videos and digital photos of flash floods in rivers of the province of Córdoba recorded and shared by citizens using advanced digital technology. Flood movies recorded by citizens are then processed to estimate river discharges using large scale image velocimetry techniques such as Large Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV). Since the last rainy season in 2014-2015, 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, extreme hydrological events occurred and in some cases the data obtained with this technique is the only information available to characterize the observed hydrological events. On the project website people can upload their flood videos along with metadata (recording date and time, location of the river section, etc.). The website provides guidelines about the best way to make contributions that are useful for quantifying flood discharges. Users who are interested in participating in the Flood Chasers Project can send or upload their videos using different platforms (i.e. Dropbox, Mega and WeTransfer) through basic tutorials generated by the scientists. There is also a webpage listing all the recorded floods and including the flow results if the video has been suitable for analysis. The following work presents different flood events analyzed in the frame of this project and also brings an objective feedback on this kind of these Citizen Science program based on crowdsourced data.