Hydro-Climate Monitoring and Prediction Lab

About us

Inherently, nature has a completely integrated essence. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, droughts and so forth have drastic effects on human-environment security. During the past decades, numerous floods and droughts have become a common physical feature of many communities. Meanwhile, possible future scenarios such as climate change, population growth, and urbanization indicate a strong need to prepare an appropriate plan for dealing with this challenge. In this Lab, we specifically focus on the occurrence pattern of extreme climate events and managing the risks of these extreme events and disasters. Our main theme includes:

• Providing a multiple Near Real-Time assessment and prediction system
• Making a platform for management and adaption to future floods and droughts (as the main natural hazards)
• Providing required weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual reports for decision and policy makers
• Tracking land use and land cover within the basin and its upper basin
• Damage evaluation, risk analysis and vulnerability assessment in flood and drought
• Risk analysis and vulnerability assessment in flood protection and river basin management
• Providing high-resolution data and mapping products
• Making capacities for future complementary planning and measures.
• Preventing annual damage due to several hazards and making society more resilient
• Directing studies and academic projects towards the developed system and its application/upgrading

Projects

Drought MonaPreS:

Droughts result in successive impacts including prolonged shortages in the water supply, weather adversities, surface water and groundwater scarcity, and degradation of ecosystem and biodiversity.

Droughts could cause a reduction of soil moisture, destruction of organic materials in soil, degradation of vegetation coverings and removal of biomass. To delineate it more, drought could cause harmful effects on agricultural production and disruption of socioeconomic developments, finally leading to an overwhelming crisis in the form of lack of food security. Moreover, natural soil will face successive erosion resulting in spreading dust hotspots. Obviously, drought cannot be prevented. However, drought could be monitored, assessed and predicted to develop new planning and scenarios to cope with its harmful effects. Drought is a looming threat for many people of Iran, a country in the arid and semi-arid region.

In this research, Sistan and Baluchestan province and the surrounding region, with specific climatic condition facing continued droughts, has been assessed for effective and sustainable water policies.

Flood MonaPreS:

According to global official reports, estimated damages caused by drought and floods have increased severely during the past years, and the extent of these consequences has been evident in environmental, economic, social and political dimensions. For example, in 2021, the Emergency Event Database (EM-DAT) recorded 432 disastrous events related to natural hazards worldwide which are considerably higher than the average of 357 annual catastrophic events form 2001-2020. Overall, these accounted for 10,492 deaths, affected 101.8 million people and caused approximately 252.1 billion US$ of economic losses. Floods dominated these events, with 223 occurrences.

In Iran, the whole country is facing the increasing risk of flood disasters, and the increasing losses caused by flood disasters, which seriously threaten the social and economic development of the country. For example, in 2019, a series of devastating floods and flash floods deluged large parts of Iran following the unprecedented rainfall events from March 17th to April 20th. As a result, flood disaster risk assessment and its effective mitigation has attracted unprecedented attention in Iran.

In this project, by perusing the establishment of a set of improved flood disaster risk assessment mechanisms, we try to develop an early warning system for predicting probable floods and consequently detecting flood prone areas and estimating damages, leading to a robust national reference scheme for flood prediction and control.

Core Expertise Provided:

• Hydrologic and hydraulic modeling
• Development of flood early warning systems
• Development of water related integrated risk management
• Developing of water related emergency and disaster management and operations

Resilient Management of Urban Drainage Systems For West Tehran:

Conventional methods challenges:

• Prolonged runoff and increased volumes
• Increased peak floods and velocities
• Increased pollution and deterioration of quality
• Increased volume of toxic material

Novel approaches

These methods are based on restoring the natural drainage patterns in place of the forced urban development limitations. They are primarily based on different tasks:

• Control at source (green roofs, …)
• Infiltration approaches (permeable asphalts, …)
• Storage approaches (detention basins, …)

Novel approaches advantages:

• Reduction of peak discharges and the relative risks
• Reduction of urban runoff of the upstream developments
• Improvement of water quality
• Storage of rainfall for further potable use
• Increased social awareness and satisfaction
• Restoration of natural drainage patterns

Services

• Hydrologic and atmospheric processes modelling
• Verification of universal weather and climate data stations and development of local combined stations
• Remote sensing of hydrological cycle components
• Development of rich databases (observed, radar, satellite …)
• Development of online hydrologic models
• Monitoring, forecasting, investigation, and alleviation of extreme events (flood, drought)
• Urban drainage and stormwater management studies
• Resilient approaches to risk management

Equipment and Instruments

• Cutting-edge computational resources (including servers and computers)
• Cutting-edge network infrastructure systems
• Cloud-based storage and computational resources

Address

Civil Engineering Department, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, No.1346, Vali-Asr St., P.C. 1969764499, Tehran, IRAN. TEL: +98-21-88201430 (ext. 330 )