Cloud Computing in Urban Flood Disaster Management

Most of the water disasters such as flood, main breaks, and water contamination can be anticipated and controlled. Lack of effective and documented communication between water related sectors/users and agencies before, during, and after disasters is one of the main causes for the osculating disasters and the existing gap that prevents urgent actions in dealing with water disasters. Therefore, building the capacity in sharing knowledge in the operational side of water resources planning and management can considerably decrease the consequences of occurring disasters in a region such as NYC. Cloud computing is a new breed of large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is driven by economics of scales. The concept of cloud computing is generated from the delivery of computing sources as a service over network. It has three categories: infrastructure as a service; platform as a service; and software as a service—these are abbreviated as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. It is easy to access and backup as well as reducing energy consuming and cost that leads to the increased reliability and flexibility. In this paper, a framework of cloud computing for flood disaster management has been explained that could be applicable for flood management. The proposed platform has the acquisition, retrieval, analysis, visualization, and mapping capabilities elements for sharing and for development of a shared vision on the collection, value and data integrity assessment, and dissemination of data and information.