PROJECT

WMO Nowcasting Voltabasin

Within the Volta Flood and Drought Management (VFDM) project implemented by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Volta Basin Authority and Global Water Partnership-West Africa, HKV (WMO partner) was requested to implement a pilot of an Urban Flash Flood Forecasting System (UFFFS) for three cities in the Volta basin: Bondoukou in Cote d’Ivoire, Tamale in Ghana and Mango in Togo.

The UFFFS is an operational system providing alerts for the three pilot cities based on nowcast of heavy rainfalls in combination with a flood risk assessment on the impacts of extreme rainfalls in the urban environment.

UFFFS makes use of openly available rainfall products provided by the Meteosat satellite and combines the rainfall retrieval with cutting edge technology in nowcasting of precipitation. Next to this, the flood risk assessment is based on open-source data sets and is improved by field surveys of the local drainage system.

The final (operational) product of UFFFS are disseminated through the MyDewetra-Voltalarm platform developed by CIMA within the Volta Flood and Drought Management (VFDM) project.