Five years of real time hydro-meteorological forecasts and monitoring for local civil protection: the SOL and MOCAP warning systems

Among the natural disasters floods are identified with the greatest impact on highly urbanized areas in economic terms and loss of human lives. Flooding phenomena are more often observed due not only to significant weather events, but also to less intense, but more frequent episodes that undermine the urban drainage system and its interconnections with the river network.

In this context, an alert system has been developed to predict possible river floods for the Seveso, Olona and Lambro rivers (SOL) 24 - 36 hours in advance with a technology based on the sequential functioning of hydrological meteorological, hydraulic engineering calculation models, and visualization on web-GIS.

The proposed flood warning system is, in fact, composed of a physically based and spatially distributed hydrological model for the rainfall-runoff transformation, fed by both observed and forecasted atmospheric forcings of various deterministic and probabilistic meteorological models such as the GFS, Bolam, Moloch, Cosmo I2 and I5, Cosmo-Leps, and WRF.

The data measured on the ground are daily provided by a citizen scientist observation network of the Meteonetwork association and by the official Arpa Lombardia network.

In recent years, this decision support system has also been integrated with a real-time hydrological monitoring and alert network (MoCAP, an Italian acronym which stands for municipal monitoring for flood alerts), developed for the civil protection of the Bovisio-Masciago town, which is located along the Seveso River.

This study describes the benchmark analysis of the coupled forecasting and monitoring systems for local civil protection purposes and its relative performance in the last five years (2018-2022) of functioning.