IoT Based Early Warning System for Torrential Floods

Being predominantly a mountainous country, in Bosnia and Herzegovina natural disasters periodically occur, especially floods, which can cause extensive material damage and human casualties. The existing flood defense system is focused on monitoring the situation on major rivers. In contrast, torrential floods are short-lived but turbulent phenomena, causing landslides, extensive material damage and loss of human lives. By collecting data from characteristic points on the terrain and analyzing them, it is possible to detect a situation which could cause torrential floods further in the river basin. Automated aggregation of such data by the competent services could provide timely organization of flood defenses. By integrating hardware components, sensors, microcontrollers with a web server and custom built software, an early warning system was created capable of providing timely alerts to the risks of pouring of the rivers, as well as the emergence of torrential streams or landslides. The system is based on a network of automatic meteorological stations (AMS), which submit data at regular intervals to a central server, where this data is further processed and displayed to persons with appropriate authorization level to access the system.