Professor Zornoza is a member of INNODES and takes part in management and metropolitan area strategy projects. Other professors from the same Department have contributted too, like Javier Serrano and Ana Belén Ruescas. Serrano coordinated civilan participation tasks. He is an investigator in the project “Social resilience development towards flood risk in the context of climate change”. Professor Ruescas, Enrique Portales and Luis Gómez Chova of Universitat de València’s Image Processing Laboratory’s group Image and Signal Laboratory has an active collaboration providing satellite images and processed data.

The cartographic methodology comes from a first approach of Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping, which still needs adjustments. It was necessary to combine teledetection techniques and civilans involvement, providing an accurate knowledge of the damaged area in a short time. The data was collected from many sources: 2.5m resolution images from Tracasa Global and the Image and Signal Processing group, mud detection of Universitat de València’s Global Change Unit and citizen familiar with the affected areas.

Creating a precise delimitation after the flood was crucial to know the human, infrastructure and service effects. The information about this disaster need a good territory base to understand the reach of the damage and the emergency and need of recovery. “Elaborating this map was important and became our best way to help out, since we could count with the techniques and knew the territory” afirmed professor and investigator Carmen Zornoza.

Civilan’s partaking provided information from local entities and victims with exact data about the flood damages on their areas. “It is a first approach to refine the field studies. The information from a direct source such as the victims was vital for the quick job, which finished just one week after the incident” concludes professor and investigator Javier Serrano.

The team had the support of Physical Geography Chairwoman and head of the research group RIUMED Ana Camarasa, with several research projects under her wing and funded by the Central Government and Generalitat Valenciana to study heavy rainfall and its effects on Mediterranean ravines, as well as developing social education tools against flood risk in face of the current climate change.

DANA consequence map here