Improving and Capacity Building of Water-Related Disasters Communication Systems Linking Regionalized EF5 Hydrological Modeling to Amazon SNS

Water and Water-related hazards are affecting the life, livelihood and properties of communities residing in Eastern and Southern Africa Region and beyond. The OU-AST developed a regionalized Ensemble Framework for Flash Flood Forecasting (EF5) Hydrological Model based on the request from the RCMRD. An ensemble hydrological prediction system forced by weather and climate forecasts is run to communicate forecasts on scales ranging from sub-daily to seasonal and in formats designed for better decision making. Additionally, the Amazon Simple Notification System (SNS), has been setup to push the alerting notification by linking it to the regionalized EF5 model. The local flooding event data has been used to set up the flooding threshold and run the regionalized EF5 hydrological model so that the alerting notification is pushed when the threshold is exceeded. The Amazon (SNS) pushes notifications to RCMRD and stakeholders via SMS text message and/or e-mails building on the success of mPING/ePING apps to decision-makers and the public. The flood alerting communication systems is a success due to the expanding use of the mobile technologies across Africa. The flood forecast, and communication system will help the end-users to operationally implement the impact-based flood alerting system linking to the EF5 hydrologic forecasts with vulnerability assessment and risk analysis to mitigate the potential negative impact to the public. The Amazon SNS is designed to allow the users to efficiently push the alert notifications at low-costs to mobile devices and e-mails. This flood hazard communication system using Amazon SNS will improve awareness and access to flood forecast and alerting through providing user -tailored services to inform decision-making processes. This study builds the capacity of decision makers and analysts on the EF5 hydrological model applications to provide high quality services to mitigate water and water-related disasters and integrated water resources management in Africa and beyond.