Early Warning Systems & Geomatics: Value-added Information in the Absence of High Resolution Data

Natural disasters such as flood or drought have a strong impact, especially in developing countries where most of world’s population lives. Moreover, increased vulnerability is due to population growth in risk prone areas. Early warning systems able to address the risk of flooding with a global coverage may be particularly effective tools for humanitarian practitioners involved in emergency management. However these systems often use open-source precipitation data for which resolutions are not able to produce accurate alerts for taking action at a regional or at a local scale. Moreover, extreme precipitation information derived from numerical weather prediction models or satellites are often not integrated with spatial reference data. This makes it particularly difficult to geographically contextualize the warnings and therefore to provide an efficient support for risk decision-making.