Monitoring and Early Warning in the Municipality of Itajubá (Mg) Through Mathematical Models (PAP014790)

Código

PAP014790

Autores

Joao Bosco Coura dos Reis, Nívea Adriana Dias Pons, EYMAR SILVA SAMPAIO LOPES

Tema

Flood forecasting and early warning systems

Resumo

In the last century it was seen a rapid global population growth, consequently there was an increase of their activities, causing several effects in the Earth system. As a result of the cause/effect relationship, the Planet begins to show a higher recurrence of extreme natural events capable to trigger disasters when cross with human occupations. In Brazil the lack of planning for occupations watershed exposes the population to hydrometeorological hazards, especially during the rainy season, when occur more often intense and prolonged rainfall events. Currently the world has looked for new forms to mitigate and adapt to the effects caused by extreme events, and within the non-structural measures, the use of geotechnologies for creating monitoring and early warning systems appear as an important prevention tool in case of flooding. The flood forecasting by early warning systems can be done through mathematical and hydrological modeling, and those models require data and information of the watershed and triggering factors. Thus it was defined as the study area the municipality of Itajubá, in southern Minas Gerais state, due to the frequency of occurrence of flood events in Sapucaí river, which is the main river that runs through the urban area. A great challenge for the implementation of monitoring and early warning systems in the region is due to lack of data and informations about the watershed. However there is only available data series of river level from seven data collection platforms, the paper proposed the development of a monitoring and flood warning system to the municipality of Itajubá, based on the application of statistical techniques, as the combination of cubic regression and analysis of error terms, in order to forecast the growth of river levels in a section of interest, using records of river levels. After adjustment and calibration of the mathematical model, it was implemented in the TerraMA² platform, which is an important geotechnology that allows the development of systems for monitoring, analysis and warning of environmental parameters in real-time. As a result it was provided a monitoring system, that despite the limitation of the analysis method used, it was able to produce consistent alerts of 3 and 4 hours in advance, which showed high correlation between the observed data and the predicted series. This early warning system can assist the decision makers, providing to authorities a tool that serves the purpose of generating a reliable estimate of growth river level, in order to reduce the loss of life and damage to properties.