Namibia Hydrological Services use G-WADI product in their Flood and Hydrological Drought Bulletin

Hydrological Services Namibia, of the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry, circulates a daily flood/hydrological drought bulletin throughout many months of the year. The bulletin provides information on weather conditions over the 24 hours preceding its publication. 

The front page of the bulletin is built around a real-time precipitation product developed by the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) of the University of California, Irvine, USA and supported by G-WADI, the International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management and others. 

The product, iRain, is based on a product called Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks - Dynamic Infrared Rain Rate near real-time (PDIR-Now). PDIR-Now is a real-time global high resolution (0.04° x 0.04° or ~4km x 4km) satellite precipitation product developed by CHRS.  

The main advantage of PDIR-Now, compared to other near-real time precipitation datasets, is its reliance on high frequency sampled IR imagery; consequently, the latency (i.e., time lag) of PDIR-Now from the time of rainfall to its display is very short (15-60 mins). Additionally, PDIR-Now accounts for the errors and uncertainties that result from the use of IR imagery by adopting a variety of techniques. The short latency of PDIR-Now renders the dataset well-suited for near-real time hydrologic applications such as flood forecasting and developing flood inundation maps. Furthermore, encouraging research results indicate the potential of using the PDIR algorithm to reconstruct historical precipitation estimates at high spatiotemporal resolution.

 Further information on the daily flood bulletin for Namibia can be obtained from hydrologynamibia@gmail.com or from the Deputy Director of Hydrology (Surface Water), Ms. Paulina Mufeti (Paulina.Mufeti@mawlr.gov.na).