Digital smart flood warning system

Contents:

  1. Project outputs
  2. Project timeline

Surface water flooding is a growing problem across West Yorkshire, disrupting residents and businesses, causing damage, costs and safety risks. The current flood response is reactive rather than proactive and there is no early warning system in place.

This project, led by Wakefield Metropolitan Borough Council, will investigate the use of connected places technology to develop a real time surface water flood warning system. This will identify flood risk sites and provide an early warning system for residents.

The warning system will allow flood teams to direct resources prior to flooding and communicate with communities at risk, thereby reducing the impact.

The project will assess the potential costs and benefits of using this system, and scope feasibility for their installation and data exchange. As flooding is a shared problem, this project proposes a shared solution across West Yorkshire.

Project outputs

This discovery project will enable knowledge exchange of the LoRaWaN network, including how the network connects with sensors, and how sensor data may communicate flood risk. The project will also investigate the viability of an early warning system for improved flood resilience.

Project timeline

March 2023

The project is awarded £97,000 in funding through Round 6 of the Local Digital Fund to begin a discovery phase.