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Welcome to the flood blog!

  • Writer: Louisa
    Louisa
  • Oct 12, 2019
  • 1 min read

Updated: Jan 8, 2020

Hello, and welcome to the flood blog! This is a space for discussing all matters diluvial, from GLOFs to lahars.

Begi the hippo is herded back to his pen in Tbilisi zoo after escaping during flash floods in 2015.
Flooding can occasionally have startling consequences. Begi the hippopotamus was one of hundreds of animals that escaped from Tbilisi zoo during flash floods in the Georgian capital in 2015. 23 people died during the floods, one of whom was killed by an escaped tiger. Photo: Tinatin Kiguradze, Associated Press.

Floods are one of the most damaging natural hazards, causing thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of damage to infrastructure and livelihoods every year. Between 1998 and 2017, two billion people were affected by flooding. Climate change and other human activities are causing flooding patterns to change, so more people in different places are being exposed to the risk of floods.


My professional background is in international development as a specialist in disaster risk reduction, and I'm interested in how governments and communities can draw on science and technology to prepare for and reduce the impact of floods. How can we can use data to provide more effective early warning for floods? How can the private sector support efforts to improve modelling and forecasting, where governments lack capacity? What techniques can we use to model and forecast floods in areas where there is very little data? And are the most impressive models any good at all if you can't effectively communicate warnings to the people most at risk? These are some of the questions that I hope to explore during the next few weeks.

3 Comments


Louisa
Louisa
Jan 08, 2020

Ah, I knew I was going to turn this blog into acronym soup at some point, didn't think I'd do it in the first post! I'll edit in a link now.


GLOFs are Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, and happen when an ice or debris dam blocking a glacial meltwater lake suddenly bursts, causing a flash flood or mudflow. They can be enlivened with the involvement of a volcano to become a jökulhlaup (an Icelandic speciality). Some of them are an annual event (there's one in Kyrgyzstan that happens every August; fortunately it's in an area remote enough that no one lives there; unfortunately seeing it (which I was desperate to) would have involved camping out in an uninhabited valley for…


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karen
Jan 08, 2020

Forgive my ignorance, but what is a GLOF?

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jenarmstrong19
Dec 05, 2019

what a great idea for a blog! good luck!!

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