Interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral construction of flood alerts at the Matanza River Basin -Argentina-: validation of a hydrological model using a community monitoring network`s measurements

NADIA TESTANI; FEDERICO ARIEL ROBLEDO; DIEGO MOREIRA; CAMILA PRUDENTE; KAZIMIERSKI, LEANDRO DAVID; MARIANO RE; MICOU, ANA PAULA; GATTI, IGNACIO AGUSTIN; SILVINA SOSA

Kigali

Conferencia; World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Open Science Conference; 2023

World Climate Research Programme (WCRP)

One of the most challenging extreme events that governments of South America have to afront due to their direct impact on population are urban floods. Moreover, future risks of urban flooding are increasing with the increases in global surface temperature. So evaluating and monitoring urban basins turns out to be a priority. In particular, there is a challenge in improving the development of products derived from river´s numerical modeling and advancing with these products social validation and assimilation through local knowledge. In order to do that the “Anticipando la Crecida” (ALC) project was created in 2013 with researchers and technicians from the Argentine scientific sector, and with local governments and stakeholders from civil society in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, in eastern Argentina. In ALC, we develop and apply a methodology based on the dialogue among scientific communities, stakeholders and policymakers to improve the understanding of urban floods and to create a local early warning system (EWS) at the Matanza River basin (MRB), a rural-urban sub-basin of La Plata Basin located in Buenos Aires, where more than five million people live. The MRB is a plain basin characterized by an hydrological response time of approximately 48 hours in the middle basin, where most people live. This allows a simple hydrological model to anticipate the MR level in the middle and low basin on a daily scale once it has rained. This motivates the calibration of the Sacramento hydrological model in three points into the MRB. To do that we use non-continuous level and flow data in the period of 2013-2015. On the other hand, to validate the model we use the measurements of rain and river level of the ALC co-produced community network in the MRB, available since 2019. In this study, we present the validation of the Sacramente hydrological model in the MRB using the measurements of rainfall and river level of the ALC community monitoring network, in view of putting it operative and incorporating it to the ALC EWS. We show that not only does the community monitoring network and knowledge of local risk provide robust social and hydro-meteorological information for local planning of risk management but also measurements of the community monitoring network are a strong tool to validate a hydrological model that could contribute to anticipate floods into the basin, a very useful tool for the local government and the community for decision making.