One of the great global challenges is the fight against climate change, one of the main effects of which is the intensification of extreme events, both droughts and floods. The management of information for decision-making and communication with society plays a decisive role in preventing and dealing with these events. With the aim of advancing modernization and efficiency in this field, the Centro de Investigación Mariña (CIM) of the Universidade de Vigo held this week at the Ourense campus the conference FLOODs 2022: Prevención, Resiliencia e Resposta fronte a Eventos Extremos. The event brought together universities and research centers with organizations from all Spanish river basins and administrations to analyze and advance tools and mechanisms to mitigate the impact of floods.
The congress was organized by the Environmental Physics Laboratory Group, Ephyslab (CIM) with the support of the Miño-Sil Hydrographic Confederation and brought together more than 60 specialists. The congress, explained its coordinators, is based on the idea that, “given the impact that the intensification of floods can have on human and material losses, it is necessary to continuously develop modeling processes that allow forecasting the possibility of floods in advance, which will result in a better and more efficient protocol for action and mitigation”. This task, pointed Ephyslab, has an important scientific component linked to the development of efficient tools, together with a component of knowledge transfer to the entities responsible for taking preventive and/or palliative measures, such as the hydrographic confederations.
During the two days of the congress, the authorities responsible for most of the hydrographic basins of the peninsula, such as Augas de Galicia, presented the state of evolution of their respective warning systems, and a group of scientists from the Universidade de Vigo (Ephyslab), A Coruña and Politécnica de Catalunya (Institut Flumen) and from centers such as CEDEX, who showed the latest advances of the IBER; tool, a two-dimensional numerical water modeling program that has become a reference model in Spain and in many Latin American countries, being used by companies, public administrations and researchers for the evaluation and management of flood risk.
In addition, researchers from the CIM talked about the Midas early warning system developed by Ephyslab and the Miño-Sil Hydrographic Confederation in the framework of the RISC Miño-Limia Project, carried out an analysis of historical floods, addressed the application of artificial intelligence techniques to the prediction of flows in reservoirs and offered a multi-scale assessment of flood risk under climate projections. The Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas also participated, presenting the experience of CEDEX in the hydrodynamic study of floods with the supercomputing tool Riber.
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Event organization members
Participants
Moncho Gómez Gesteira, Elena Rivo, José Antonio Quiroga e Carlos Guillermo Ruiz during the event inauguration
