FloodwaterDeveloping ‘Smart City’ Floodwater Management

Published 23 July 2019

In a world of smart watches, smart homes and smart appliances that monitor their environments to keep users safe and informed, can whole cities be smarter? Short answer: Probably, using cutting-edge information technologies to keep citizens and property safer.

In a world of smart watches, smart homes and smart appliances that monitor their environments to keep users safe and informed, can whole cities be smarter? Short answer: Probably, using cutting-edge information technologies to keep citizens and property safer. The long answer: NAU researchers Eck Doerry and Ben Ruddell aim to find out through their FloodAware project, which allows them to explore what it would mean for a city to be “smart” about floodwater management. 

“We realized that cutting-edge hydrological modeling, image processing and real-time sensing techniques could be brought together to help citizens, city administrators and first responders better react to flooding and, ideally, be warned of imminent flooding before the water arrives” said Doerry, a professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS). “The system will integrate numerous data streams to calculate real-time maps of current and upcoming flooding and can then send a notification to citizens in endangered areas. This is really what being a smart city means to us: the city keeps an eye on threats and warns citizens in appropriate ways.”

ASU says that the key to making all of this happen is finding clever, low-cost, low-impact ways to gather accurate water level readings in real-time from as many places around the city as possible.  Most cities, including Flagstaff, already have some flow monitoring equipment placed in various washes and drainages around the city. The challenge in getting more of this equipment is the sensors are so expensive that neither the city nor FloodAware can afford many of them.  

The solution explored by the FloodAware project is to develop smart image processing techniques to determine water level from a simple snapshot image. If this could be done, researchers could piggyback on the hundreds of cameras already in place in the city to control traffic lights, monitor intersections and deploy as public webcams.

Citizens will soon be strongly encouraged to participate in making their city smarter as well.