Development of a real-time regional-inundation forecasting model for the inundation warning system

Accurate forecasts of the inundation depth are necessary for inundation warning and mitigation. In this paper, a real-time regional forecasting model is proposed to yield 1- to 3-h lead time inundation maps. First, the K-means based cluster analysis is developed to group the inundation depths and to indentify the control points. Second, the support vector machine is used as the computational method to develop the point forecasting module to yield inundation forecasts for each control point. Third, based on the forecasted depths and the geographic information, the spatial expansion module is developed to expand the point forecasts to the spatial forecasts. An actual application to Siluo Township, Taiwan, is conducted to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed model. The results indicate that the proposed model can provide accurate inundation maps for 1- to 3-h lead times. The accurate long lead time forecasts can extend the lead time to allow sufficient time to take emergency measures. Furthermore, the proposed model is an efficient process that can be trained rapidly with real-time data and is more suitable to be integrated with the decision support system. In conclusion, the proposed modeling technique is expected to be useful to support the inundation warning systems.