Many people and industries live and are located in high hydraulic hazard areas and climate change is increasing the occurrence of extreme precipitation events. To efficiently manage emergencies, Civil and Environmental Protection operators need a valuable flood risk now-casting system.
In this context, they suffer the lack of: i) real-time information about the areal distribution of heavy rain, and ii) solutions able to timely predict rainfall effects basing on the observation of the actual meteo-hydrologic situation instead of simulated scenarios derived from weather forecasting.
Our disruptive solution is a Decision Support System – DSS that takes advantage of the patented Smart Rainfall System - SRS(Italian patent UIBM n. 0001412786, EU pending, n. EP2688223) technology for a better response to hydrogeological emergencies: it exploits existing infrastructure and low-energy Internet of Things sensors to estimate and to pinpoint rainfall in real-time by processing the attenuation of the satellite TV signals transmitted by commercial satellites and received by a distributed network of common parabolic dishes. The SRS measurements allow the continuative computation of short-term hydrogeological risk forecasts. Our DSS allows a time anticipation of the emergency that ranges from 1 hour ahead (depending on the characteristic of the catchment) allowing authorities to manage the emergency.
By introducing a real-time support decision service on the market based on a low cost annual subscription business model, SRS permits a significant economic and social impact, allowing the decision makers to undertake efficient interventions and communications.
Just considering the main target users, Civil Protection bodies, economic benefits deriving from a widespread implementation of the innovation are impressive: significant decreasing of insured economic losses, significant decreasing of costs related to health services, significant decreasing of costs related to business defaults and negligible cost for the system maintenance.