The Rivers Agency of Northern Ireland has launched a new online service to provide local authorities, residents and private organisations with better information about flood risks. Called the Strategic Flood Map (NI) – Rivers & Sea, this vital new resource is powered by ArcGIS.
Introduction
The Rivers Agency of Northern Ireland has launched a new online service to provide local authorities, residents and private organisations with better information about flood risks. Called the Strategic Flood Map (NI) – Rivers & Sea, this vital new resource is powered by ArcGIS.
Client
The Rivers Agency of Northern Ireland, an executive Agency within the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. The Agency’s vision is to manage the flood risk to facilitate the social, economic and environmental development of Northern Ireland. To support the vision the Agency aims to reduce the risk to life and the damage to property from flooding from rivers and the sea and to undertake watercourse and coastal flood management in a sustainable manner.
The Challenge
Flooding from rivers and the sea is a natural phenomenon that cannot be entirely prevented. However, when it occurs unexpectedly, flooding can put lives at risk, cause considerable damage to properties and lead to extensive disruption for entire communities. The Rivers Agency, an executive Agency within the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Northern Ireland, wanted to make information about the risks of flooding more accessible to a wider number of people and organisations.
The Solution
The new Strategic Flood Map has been launched on the River Agency’s web site. It shows areas that could be affected by flooding from rivers or the sea. It also provides information on the location of flood defence schemes and other measures that the Rivers Agency has put in place to reduce flood risk. People living and working in areas prone to flooding can access the web site to find out more about the risks and take appropriate action to mitigate them.
The Benefits
The Strategic Flood Map service is of interest to a range of stakeholders including: Government, industry and commerce with regard to assessing flood risk to infrastructure, business and services, and in terms of emergency planning and response; Local authorities and developers with regard to spatial planning and the public with regard to raising awareness of flood risk, so that communities and individuals are better prepared.
The Technology Used
To identify potential flood risk areas in a consistent and comprehensive manner across Northern Ireland the Rivers Agency through the use of ESRI’s GIS Technology has used predictive modelling and mapping techniques to estimate the extent of our river and coastal flood plains.
ArcGIS Desktop & ArcGIS Server
The solution was implemented using a combination of ESRI’s ArcGIS Server and Desktop technologies in collaboration between Rivers Agency and ESRI Ireland. The Rivers Agency, as an experienced and accomplished ESRI user, created the flooding data and cartographically enhanced this information using ArcGIS Desktop for subsequent web provision via the ArcGIS Server platform. This was a challenging task as the agency had to make a variety of complex flood mapping data-sets available in a way that could be easily understood by both professional planners and the general public alike.
The data itself was provisioned as OGC compliant WMS services that are made available through the Strategic Flood Map Viewer. It was an important consideration for the Rivers Agency that this information should be consumed within the bounds of this map viewer so that the user was made aware of the context in which the information should be used.
The project delivery has been innovative on many levels, from complex flood modelling to create the flood outlines which was undertaken by RPS Consulting Engineers, to the dissemination of that information in a high performance and extremely user friendly map viewer which utilises the best in class Geographical Information System technology supplied by ESRI Ireland. The ESRI stack of GIS technology combined with the Rivers Agency spatial data enables decisions that deliver better outcomes for organisations, for the environment and for society in general.
A substantial amount of modelling and spatial analysis was involved in the actual production of the flooding information that is provisioned through the Strategic Flood map web viewer. This work was carried out by the Rivers Agency of Northern Ireland and the engineering partners RPS Consulting Engineers and resulted in a variety of layers of flooding information being produced to reflect historical, present day and predictive flooding into the future.