The hazard control room for the insurance Industry

About 7 per cent of residential properties in homes across Australia are exposed to predictable and repetitive flooding, causing an average of $450 million in flood damage each year. Insurers and water authorities want to fully understand the cause of flooding. Currently it takes water managers a lot of time and effort to collect the required information before, during and after an extreme rainfall and flood event. Water managers have a difficult task and require improved information regarding rainfall and streamflow to manage flood events as they unfold allowing them more time to make good decisions. Thanks to funding from the European Space Agency a solution will be developed that allows water managers and insurance companies to access required information quickly and easily. Objective of the InsureApp is to demonstrate “The Rain and Flood Report Generator” service which automatically collects the best available rainfall and flood data from crowdsourcing apps, gauges, radars and satellites for any specified location in Australia. The report generator smartly combines and translates this data into easy to understand rainfall and flood maps and automatically generates documents containing all required information to support flood analysis. Rainfall information is an important source to identify flood causes. Moreover, in water management terms, rainfall is the most important element in the water balance. Water managers can increase water system understanding by improving precipitation quality. In this way, the tools developed in this project are beneficial for both insurance companies and water managers. Australia was chosen as project area, as numerous disasters occur in Australia, the populated areas are poorly monitored and using satellite data is therefore expected to be very beneficial.

An extension of Insureapp, called FloodIntelligence, is the development of the forecasting and real-time warning application which will provide flood intelligence services before and during a flood or rain event is currently ongoing. These services will also be very useful in case of emergencies caused by flood or rain.