The Challenges of Flood Monitoring Across Political Boundaries:
Taking Stock of Emerging Opportunities and Moving Ahead
Faisal Hossain
Tennessee Technological University
Abstract:
Terrestrial water flow recognizes no political boundaries, only the topographic limits of the basin.
Yet there are more than 260 basins in the world today that are subject to international
administrative boundaries. Known as International River Basins (IRB), these basins lie in the
jurisdiction of multiple nations and are ubiquitous in all 5 continents. Considering that floods
account for more than 15% of the annual global death toll by natural hazards, our ability to
monitor the early evolution of flooding across political boundaries is very important due to the
tremendous societal implications for downstream riparian nations. This seminar will address the
state-of-the-art on international flood monitoring in light of the emerging opportunities. In the
first part of the seminar, an overview will be presented on the current challenges facing the
hydrologic community for operational transboundary modeling of flood flow. Inadequate in-situ
infrastructure and the non-availability of treaties for real-time hydrologic data sharing among
nations are identified as the main impediments, especially in the developing world. When cast in
the context of emerging opportunities through planned satellite missions, namely the Global
Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, these impediments appear surmountable in principle.
However, such opportunities demand prioritization of research in key areas to accelerate the
realization of a tangible solution. The seminar will summarize our current understanding of the
implications of the complex satellite rainfall uncertainty in surface hydrologic applications. In the
second part of the seminar, an assessment framework, comprising a fully distributed hydrologic
model and a hydro-political component, will be presented as a proposed proxy for identification
of IRBs most likely to benefit from satellite rainfall data. The framework is based on first
principles of conservation of mass and momentum and parsimoniously models the geophysical
features alongside key surface hydrologic processes. A modeled ‘guess’ is derived from this
framework on the improvement we can realistically anticipate from current satellite data in flood
monitoring capability for a downstream nation in an IRB. This ‘guess’ lends itself to interesting
speculation on specific nations in IRBs that demand greater need for satellite rainfall data in an
operational framework. Finally, the seminar will end with a proposed long-term research agenda
as a way forward towards better flood monitoring for the flood endangered inhabitants in IRBs.