Home / News / EUROPE IS GOING X: four European cities are moving to X-band radar technology in order to innovate rainfall observation and flood management.Print
12 April 2013
EUROPE IS GOING X: four European cities are moving to X-band radar technology in order to innovate rainfall observation and flood management.
Two of the latest generation, X-band, radars have recently been purchased in Paris and Rotterdam. Other types of weather X-band radars are being tested in London and Leuven. The radars will give a very accurate picture of precipitation patterns and in particular precipitation peaks in these cities; greatly helping to better manage urban floods and reduce water damages. The RainGain project has 3.6 M€ worth of funding provided by the European Commission in the framework of the Interreg IVB NWE Programme.
Rain radars are the only measuring instruments that can provide precipitation data on the space-time scales that are required to better cope with intense storms. The new generation radars provide a significant increase in measurement resolution. This corresponds to multiplying the number of rainfall pixels by the order of one hundred.
Innovative water management solutions based on the newly available high resolution rainfall data are to be developed by four universities – École des Ponts ParisTech, Imperial College London, KU Leuven and TU Delft – in collaboration with water managers, city managers and weather institutes. These improvements are particularly necessary for flood management, as well as for water pollution reduction. This will strengthen the resilience of our cities to climate change and facilitate their sustainable development.
More information:
Press contact
Rosa Vicari
Rosa.Vicari@leesu.enpc.fr
T +33 1 6415 3779
M +33 6 3871 0939
Project coordinator
Marie-Claire ten Veldhuis
J.A.E.tenVeldhuis@tudelft.nl
T +31 15 278 47 34
M +31 6 41 66 55 02