Sharing Data And Information on Local Flooding Risk in Niger

Relevant data on hydroclimatic risks collected in LDCs (Least Developed Countries) by intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, university institutes, research organizations, projects and programs funded by national and international institutions often are not shared in interoperable way for further usage. Currently emerging climate services offered by global and national meteorological organizations are implemented in order to provide stakeholders and political authorities with useful and reliable information for supporting the decision making process and develop strategies for flooding risk management. However, in order to improve the usability and usefulness of information derived from hydrometeorological forecasts and hydrological models, climate services are expected to be tailored to the actual and local decision-making context. Local flood risk areas mapping is an essential information for a wide number of applications, ranging from engineering to climate change studies, and is crucial for planning effective emergency responses. In this contest, we present the SLAPIS (Système Local d’Alerte Précoce pour les Inondations de la Sirba) web application, developed in the framework of ANADIA 2.0 cooperation project (funded by Italian Agency for Development Cooperation) for the implementation of an early warning system, aiming to better tailor hydroclimatic information to the user's needs, both in terms of content and format. In order to improve the effectiveness of the system, stakeholders have been labeled, from local communities to national decision makers, according with their requirements. The study was carried out in the Middle Niger River Basin, focusing on one of its main tributaries, the Sirba River. From the point of view of Geomatics and Information Communication Technologies (ICT), the activities concerned the conceptual and formal data model design, the development of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), a client-server architecture and users’ interface, the implementation of standard OWSs (Open Web Services), a Web application and procedures for data flow management from several hydroclimatic data providers. Specific REST Web Services, using JAX-RS technologies, have been implemented in order to allow the communication with other interoperable distributed platforms so enhance the dissemination of the local data. This last task is particularly oriented to the community of experts and researchers who will benefit from this way of data in a standard format exploitable for further analysis. The system also includes the metadata catalog implemented using CKAN allowing data to be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable in an easy and standard way. An operational test during the current raining season, conducted with the assistance of the Directorate for Hydrology of Niger, is under way in order to determine the accuracy and improve the reliability of the system. The choice of interoperable web services approach allows to share data and information with other platforms or client software as well as the development of tools for the dissemination of information through ICT applications. In this way it will be possible to provide specific advices for end users at different decision-making levels, bridging the gap between available technology and local users’ needs for adaptation, mitigation and flooding risk management in the Sahel.