Flood Risk Intelligence

Flood Risk Intelligence is GECOsistema's consultancy and modelling service for fluvial (river), pluvial (surface-water) and coastal flooding. It produces flood maps and risk datasets that insurers, public agencies and private investors use to visualise, assess and understand potential flood risk, at local, regional and national scale for most countries of the world.

The service combines simple DEM-based GIS approaches with advanced hydrodynamic models, calibrated and validated and grounded on recorded evidence of real flood events. GECOsistema runs 1D to 3D hydraulic models, from coarse to local scale where accurate topographic and hydrological data are available, using codes such as LISFLOOD, HEC-RAS, River 2D, BREZO, ANUGA and TELEMAC-2D; local-scale modelling also supports the optimisation of infrastructure and hydraulic defences. GIS-based analysis covers wide-area natural-hazard mapping in support of emergency and urban planning.

Satellite data enters through GECOsistema's machine-learning methods for mapping natural hazards, which focus on floods. These process satellite images, using data-driven thresholding of Sentinel-2 data, together with DEM-derived indicators (slope, altitude, aspect, curvature, topographic wetness index and others), land-use and lithology layers to map flooded areas quickly.

GECOsistema is an environmental consulting, engineering and research company based in Rimini, Italy. It also develops the SmartFLOOD and URBAN_SmartFLOOD cloud-web platforms for rapid flood hazard mapping over large areas and cities.