Dresden (dpa / sn) - A research project is intended to improve the early warning of floods in local extreme weather. The State Institute for the Environment, Agriculture and Geology announced on Tuesday that previous precipitation and runoff forecasts for small river catchment areas were often too imprecise in terms of space and time. In the project, a tried and tested method is to be further developed in which real-time precipitation amounts for small areas were determined more precisely using signals from mobile phone masts and radar data from the German Weather Service. Now empirical values of the disaster and water protection authorities from three test regions in the Vogtland, the Eastern Ore Mountains and Upper Lusatia are also used.
The experts emphasized that the smaller the precipitation can be determined and predicted, the more accurate the early flood warning will be in the event of local extreme rain. The "HoWa-PRO" project is scheduled to run for two years and is being supported by the Federal Ministry of Research with 1.43 million euros. Among others, scientists from the Universities of Augsburg and Dresden are involved.
