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UCL

Hydromax is a real-time application for riverflow forecasting which is developped by CESAME and is operational at SETHY

(Service d'Ètudes Hydrologiques, Walloon Ministry of Public Works - Belgium) for the management of flood alarms and the

on-line information of the rescue services in the Meuse river basin.

River basin

Rain gauges

From the telemetering network to

Hydromax

Hydromax is connected with the

telemetering network of SETHY. This

network is essentially made up of water

level chart recorders and rain gauges. All

the remote measurements are stored in a

hydrological data base on the central

computer. The forecasting computer is

connected to it on-line (Fig.1).

The main features of Hydromax

Direct connection with the telemetering data base.

Shor t term r iverf low forecasting only based on hydrological measurements.

Long te r m r i ve r f l ow forecasting based on hydrological measurements and meteorological forecasts.

Data processing and model performance analysis.

The advantages of Hydromax

Data saving : only rainfall and riverflow data are needed. A detailed physical description of the basin is not required.

The identified parameters remain valid from a flood to another : the models are systematically validated on floods which are not used for the model identification.

Friendly user design in order to meet the requirements of an efficient real time forecasting.

Fig.1. From field data acquisition to forecasting

Fig.2. Big floods cause high economic and social losses.

(c) MET-D212-SETHY

Control Centre

Centralcomputer

Forecasting computer

Ob

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Te lemetr ingNetwork

Data storageandprocessing

Flood Forecast ingAnalysisIdent i f icat ion

Measured rain (mm)

Measured water level (m)

Water levelrecorder

Rating curveRiverflow (m /s)

Hydrologicaldata base

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UCLCentre for Systems Engineer ing and Appl ied Mechanics

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UCLCentre for Systems Engineer ing and Appl ied Mechanics

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Hydromax is developped by CESAME

and is operational at MET-D212-SETHY Boulevard du Nord, 8

5000 NamurBelgium

Fig.3 Example of Hydromax windows : forecasting of Ourthe (a Meuse tributary) flowrate during the big flood of January 1995.

Meteorologicalforecasts window

Characteristics of the riverflow station

Simulations basedon meteorological

forecasts

Simulations without rainfall

Predicted riverflow

Meteorologicalforecasts

Measured rainfallMeasured riverflow

A t y p i c a l e x a m p l e o f H y d r o m a x w i n d o w s f o r f l o o d f o r e c a s t i n g

Hydromax provides both short term and long term riverflow

forecastings. This is illustreted in Fig.3 where typical windows of

Hydromax are presented.

The short term prediction (blue dot) is computed from on-line field

measurements (rainfall and discharge).

The long term forecasting (red curve) is computed from

meteorological forecasts.

The green curve is the riverflow forecasting without rainfall. It is the

most optimistic hypothesis.

G. Bastin & L. Moens-CESAME -

Bâtiment EulerAv. Georges Lemaître 41348 Louvain-la-Neuve,

Belgium

e-mail: moens@auto.ucl.ac.bec Bonaffini_art