The RainGain team at ICUD 2014, Malaysia
by Rosa Vicari / École des Ponts ParisTech
From the 7th to the 12th September five of our delegates attended the 13th International Conference on Urban Drainage in Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo). The subject of this edition was "Urban drainage in the context of integrated urban water management: a bridge between developed and developing countries".
Patrick Willems (KU Leuven) presented an article jointly produced by the RainGain partners on "High resolution radar rainfall for urban pluvial flood control lessons learnt from ten pilots in North-Western Europe Within the RainGain Project" by M. ten Veldhuis et al. About 100 people attended the presentation and many questions arose, among others: if a comparison between aggregated X-band data (100 m - 1000 m) and C-band data at the same resolution is envisaged ; if sewer monitoring campaigns are performed to validate fine-scale rainfall products ; how is the fractal analysis applied in the project and for which purposes ; are X-band radar data accessible to the public through a web service.
Two other presentations concerning the project outcomes were held by Abdellah Ichiba (CG94) on "Using radar forecasting for predictive management of a retention basin" and Rui Pina (ICL) on "Semi-distributed or fully distributed rainfall-runoff models for urban pluvial flood modelling".
The latest outcomes of the RainGain project were also reported to two International Water Association working groups that were meeting at the conference: IGUR (International Working Group on Urban Rainfall, chaired by Patrick Willems) and IGDM (International Working Group on Data and Models, chaired by Simon Tait from Sheffield University).