Hydromax : Application for River Flow Forecasting
Hydromax is a river flow forecasting application for the early warning of extreme hydrological events
(floods as well as low waters).
Hydromax provides in real-time short-term predictions of river flows based on past rainfall and river
flow measurements, and long-term river flow forecasting based on weather forecasts.
Hydromax was
developed at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve by the Mathematical Engineering Department,
a subdivision of the ICTEAM institute.
Hydromax has been successfully operational for almost thirty years at the "Direction de la Gestion Hydrologique" of the Walloon Public Administration
(SPW-MI).
A typical example of Hydromax results for flood forecasting
Hydromax provides both short term and long term river flow
forecasts with confidence intervals.
The short term prediction (blue dot), in this case 8 hours ahead, is only computed from on-line field
measurements (rainfall and river flow).
The long term forecasting (red curve) is based on the future rainfall scenario.
The black curve is the river flow forecasting without rainfall. It is the
most optimistic hypothesis.
Additional information for the forecaster are also displayed, for instance :
- Quality coefficients corresponding to the percentage of the reliable data within the set of data
that are needed to achieve a forecasting. All of the rainfall and river flow data are checked to give information
about their quality. Missing and unreliable data (e.g. outliers) are discarded and replaced by
interpolated or extrapolated values.
- Availability of future rainfall scenarios from the Royal Meteorological Institue.
From the telemetery network to Hydromax
Hydromax is connected to the telemetery network of DGH. This network is essentially made up of water level recorders and rain gauges. All the remote measurements are stored in a hydrological data base on the SPW-MI server. The forecasting server is connected to it on-line.
The main features of Hydromax
- Direct connection to the hydrological data base.
- Short term river flow forecasting only based on hydrological measurements.
- Long term river flow forecasting based on hydrological measurements and meteorological forecasts.
- Data processing and model performance analysis.
The advantages of Hydromax
- Data saving : only rainfall and river flow measurements are needed. A detailed physical description of the basin is not required.
- The identified parameters of the model remain valid from a flood to another : the models are systematically validated on floods which are not used for the model identification.
- Friendly user design in order to meet the requirements of an efficient real time forecasting. Nowadays, Hydromax runs automatically each hour to produce river flow forecats for more than 45 stations and the results can be seen in a Web interface.
References
Videos
Conference papers
Journal papers
Funding Bodies
Service Public de Wallonie Mobilité et Infrastructures
Département Expertises Hydraulique et Environnement
Direction de la Gestion hydrologique
Contact Person
Luc MOENS & Julien HENDRICKX
Mathematical Engineering Department
Euler Building
Avenue Georges Lemaître, 4 - bte L4.05.01
B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
luc.moens@uclouvain.be