Forecasting and communication key elements for low-cost fluvial flooding early warning system in urban areas

Fluvial flooding occurs when a river overspills its banks due to excessiverainfall, and it is the most common flood event. In urban areas, the increment of urbanization makes communities more susceptible to fluvial floodingsince the excess of impervious surfaces reduced the natural permeable areas.As flood prevention strategies, early warning systems (EWS) are used toreduce damage and protect people, but key elements need to be selected. Thismanuscript proposes the monitoring instruments, communication protocols,and media to forecast and disseminate EWS alerts efficiently during fluvialfloods in urban areas. First, we conducted a systematic review of different EWS architectures for fluvial floods in urban areas and identified that not allprojects monitor the most important variables related to the formation offluvial floods and most use communication protocols with high-energyconsumption. ZigBee and LoRaWAN are the communication protocols withlower power consumption from the review, and to determine whichtechnology has better performance in urban areas, two wireless sensornetworks were deployed and simulated in two urban areas susceptible tofluvial floods using Radio Mobile software. The results showed that althoughZigbee technology has better-received signal strength, the difference withLoRAWAN is lower than 2dBm, but LoRaWAN has a better signal-to-noiseratio, power consumption, coverage, and deployment cost.