Improving Flood Alert – AMAC

The AMAC project is based upon a pluridisciplinary approach of the flooding risk including geographical, sociological, hydraulic and mathematical approaches in order to improve its management. The project aims at better improving flood alert of the flooding risk as well from a technical viewpoint as about social response. It supposes on one hand an improvement of hydrodynamic models to reach a satisfactory relevance of model prevision and uncertainties, especially in locations that are of particular interest to flood planners and risk assessors. On the other hand, there is a need for better understanding how decision making influences human behaviour before, during and after the event in order to identify the way of improving crisis management The goal and originality of the project consist in an interaction between hydrodynamic modelling, social demand and public policy. Therefore, AMAC partners belonging to 'Human and Social Sciences' HSS will aim at identifying pertinent distributed indicators which characterize social vulnerability; such indicators being capable of modifying the impact of alert process and crisis management and hence model design. Partners belonging to 'Engineering Sciences' ES will work on model improvement in order to reach a satisfactory picture of flooding, particularly in critical zones, by identifying physical processes and defining assimilation methods adapted for heterogeneous data; in order to reinforce the efficiency and accuracy of model prevision. All different partners will work together in order to build an integrated model of flooding risk. This collective work will focus on the social demand concerning alert and risk management and on the new ways of modeling and forecasting. A detailed study will be carried out on both the Touch and the Lèze river watersheds where AMAC actors already dispose of a renowned expertise. A global upstream Garonne watershed study will also provide a large amount of risk alert records on different flooding events. The project is distributed into 4 tasks associating partners relatively to their competence in the domain. Task 1 'data collection: hazard and vulnerability diagnosis' consists in the identification and distribution of hazard and its impacts in view of a preparatory characterization of vulnerability distribution. Task2 'model design' focuses on the design of a 2D free surface software dedicated to flooding. Task 3 'prevention for the sake of alert efficiency' gathers ES and HSS aspects on the elaboration of a multi-agent model designed for the characterization of social and land dynamics in presence of a flooding risk. One goal consists, by assimilating all possible information, including historical records, in improving model relevance in terms of prevision and alert. The implementation and efficiency of preventive information and the comprehension of human behaviour during crisis will also be discussed in order to understand why information is not always relevant in terms of reaction to alert. Task 4 'synchronization and integration of results' based on ES and HSS constant cooperation will hopefully lead to the design of an integrated model characterizing the risk and leading to a better alert efficiency. AMAC finally aims at proposing a demonstrator capable of integrating numerical and sociological modelling of flooding risk.