Storm, Floods and Radar Hydrology

  • Duration1991 - 1993
  • Budget Total / NTUA1.000.000€/125.005€
  • Scientific Responsible

    M.A.Mimikou

  • Funding

    EU / DG Research FP 4 Program

The Research (in these two projects) focused on the implementation of weather radar for hydrological applications, especially for spatial rainfall measurement and estimation, and consequently for storm and flash flood forecasting and warning.

More specifically, the scientific goals of the project involved research in the following areas:

– analysis and processing of acquired radar reflectivity data sets

– development of methods for local short-term rainfall forecasting using weather radar

– development of procedures for flood flow forecasting by using weather radar

A hydrometerological study in a river basin was conducted to demonstrate the use of a weather radar for rainfall and flood-flow forecasting. The study region is a Pinios river sub-basin with a drainage area of 2,763 km2 located in central Greece. Storm events that created flash floods were recorded every 10-30 min, and were analysed and processed in terms of ground clutter suppression, anomalous propagation, beam refraction, and the losses and merging procedures of radar and rain-gauge rainfall data. A rainfall-runoff model for flood-flow forecasting based on the unit hydrograph theory was then applied twice. First, by using as input the mean areal rain-gauge rainfall derived by applying the Thiessen polygon method and second, by applying the mean areal radar rainfall information over the basin. It was found that the model performs better when it uses processed weather radar data as input. Results of using as input one- and two-hour forecasted rainfall for flood forecasting were encouraging.