Objectives of the service
MoMoRib® is a game changing technology designed to make flood risk management more reliable and accurate. Our user friendly software makes automatic calculation for users interested in river banks and levees monitoring, river structure design, regulation drafting, or to take flash action after general flood warnings. MoMoRib® was developed in a Matlab®desktop environment and can easily be escalated to ingest data from other sensors related to loss of topsoil, speed of water, sediments, or statistics on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
MoMoRib® was tested in the Po Delta, the largest river in Italy, where many entities are using multiple sensors to monitor the riverbanks and substantial resources have been allocated to prevent floods.
Users and their needs
MoMoRib® will help to improve the efficiency in the evaluation of hydro-meteorological risk and promote sustainable development within the European Flood Risk Management Directive Implementation (2009).
The study of flooding events resulting from bank over-flooding and levee breaching is of large interest for both society and environment, because flood waves, resulting from levee failure, might cause loss of lives and destruction of properties and ecosystems.
Major MoMoRib® users are:
- Public Administration
- Insurance companies
- Agro-industrial companies
- Weather Risk Professional Firms
- Construction Companies
- Companies or Organisations that extract and/or manage natural resources (water, oil, gas)
- Companies or Organisations that clean rivers from plastic and medicine residuesConsulting Companies providing river integrated solutions
- River trusts and NGOs
- International organisations with interest in preventing floods and other disasters
Service/ system concept
MoMoRib® System architecture consists of three main parts:
- Input module is where selected key parameters are ingested. To determine the key parameters it is necessary to select the most suitable and available in-situ and satellite sensors, e.g. InSAR can be very helpful especially in areas with potential risk of subsidence. There are several commercial in-situ sensors that can help to measure distance and surface mapping. Many hydrological and geological monitoring techniques use real-time data acquisition systems coupled with different electronic devices and sensors to collect more reliable flood prediction information along with hazard warning applications. The information from all the selected sensors is ingested and processed in a MATLAB® environment.
- Calculation module is based on standard linear and non-linear analysis techniques. It comprises a) velocity calculation where geodetic or interferometric velocities are automatically computed; b) levee area calculation using machine learning proprietary algorithms.
- Output module or delivering module, is where the levee breaching risk zones are mapped using the calculation outcome.
Visualization of geodetic and interferometric velocities, and contour map of interferometric velocities using linear interpolation
Final plot: low alert level
Space Added Value
The involvement of space assets in MoMoRib® is crucial, since the system is based on the analysis of spatial-temporal patterns acquired by satellite remote sensing. In particular, the “levee level” parameter is collected from satellite-based advanced differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (A-DInSAR), a geomatic technique used for the characterization of ground motions over large areas and capable of detecting movements with metric resolution and millimetric accuracy. Moreover, many altimeter sensors on board of Geodetic Satellites measure the instantaneous water surface and allow to estimate the river level. Also, the recent acquisition of high-quality SAR data with fine spatial and temporal sampling characteristics, when combined with high-resolution optical remote sensing, can be used for the high-resolution soil moisture retrieval over vegetated areas and for the parametrization of vegetation water content. Finally, microwave radar or radiometer and scattered-meters satellite-based systems measure the dielectric constant of soils and, as consequence, can assess the soil water content or “soil humidity”.
We highlight the importance that the input data for MoMoRib® come from post-processed satellite-images and, in particular, from the post-processing of altimetric and surface parameters time series.
Po Valley, Italy
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018–19), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Floods in northern Italy
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
