CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Researchers at 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, Argentina. These videos and photos are recorded and shared by citizens using advanced digital technology. Flood movies recorded by citizens are processed to estimate flow velocities and discharges in rivers using large scale image velocimetry techniques such as Large Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV). During the rainy season 2014-2015, extreme hydrological events occurred in rivers of the province of Córdoba and in some cases the hydrological and hydraulic data obtained with this technique is the only information available to characterize the extreme hydrological events. A dedicated website has been generated for the Flood Chasers Project which allows citizens to upload flood videos along with associated metadata (video recording date and time, location of the river section, etc.). In addition, 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. A listing of all the flood videos submitted along with the results of the image analyses are also available on the Project Web page. Estimated discharges and velocities are only available for those videos that were suitable for analysis. This work summarize results of different flood events analyzed for this project and also brings an objective feedback Citizen Science programs based on crowdsourced data.