Friday 24 May 2013
A drone monitoring system that could track potentially deadly floods in real time to sound an alarm before they hit is being developed in the Kingdom. Existing forecasting models are good at predicting roughly when an area might experience the right mix of conditions to create a flash flood, but they can't say precisely when or where a flood will strike. Flash floods are quick and deadly. At least 13 people died when a surge hit parts of the Kingdom earlier this month. In 2010, thunderstorms dumped rain over arid land to the east of Jeddah, hitting the city with no warning, resulting in 124 deaths.
Christian Claudel at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is working on the drone system that could give such cities between 30 minutes and 2 hours of warning, as well as predicting the flood's path. In the proposed system a group of about 10 drones would drop disposable wireless sensors across the region at risk; any sensors meeting floodwater would be carried away on the current while the drones tracked their signal. Data showing the sensors' changing positions would be relayed by the drones to a central database to create a model of floodwater flow, Claudel said.
"The sensors are made of printed circuits on paper, which reduces the cost of the device," an advantage over dedicated, expensive sensors with their own communications systems that may never be recovered, he said. Kristen Rasmussen, who studies flash flooding at the University of Washington in Seattle, says it would be really useful to combine the drone system with existing models that take account of terrain and how the water moves.
© Arab News 2013
