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After the recent intense hydrometeorological events that have affected the south of Chile, the group of researchers of UFROs Water Resources Observatory of the Faculty of Engineering and Science made a new rainfall monitoring platform available. |
The free and publicly accessible web platform Mawün-NRT, developed at the Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO), was recently presented to the public services department and the regional community and allows to observe the rainfall intensity and distribution in continental Chile. This new technological development is the result of a collaboration between the Observatory of Water Resources in La Araucanía (Kimün-Ko) of the Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering and Science, and the Center for Climate and Resilience Science (CR2), and is now a climate service available for the citizens and entities related to the decision-making in the event of bad weather fronts. The UFRO academic Dr. Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini explains that the idea of this platform is to “monitor extreme precipitation events occurring in our region. In addition, it is a source of information for our citizens. We put a lot of effort into the development of Mawün-NRT, to make it intuitive and easy to use, especially for the technical bodies involved in the decision-making regarding hydrometeorological risks.“ “The platform‘s use allows us to detect the potential flood zones, due to accumulation of precipitation during the days before the event that is being analyzed. In this sense, we hope that this platform will be the first step towards an early flood warning system for the La Araucanía Region,“ he added. The Vice-rector for Research and Graduate Studies of UFRO, Dr. Rodrigo Navia Diez, explained: “This platform manages spatial and temporal data that gives us a precipitation map for high-impact events, which will be very useful for decision-makers and citizens.“ “The team has been working with national and international research centers on climate change issues and achieved a development of great interest for our region in terms of applied research,“ added Franklin Valdebenito Godoy, the Director of Innovation and Technology Transfer. CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES This project is a great achievement for Dr. Jorge Farías Avendaño, the dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Science. “We are witnessing how climate change presents new circumstances and challenges for society. In this context, the work led by Dr. Zambrano-Bigiarini represents our commitment and social responsibility to our future generations, which will be able to confront these and other phenomena that affect us in a better way.“ Mawün-NRT not only allows to visualize maps with the spatial distribution of precipitation, obtained from state-of-the-art gridded products, but also hourly precipitation data from rain gauges from different Chilean institutions, for example the Chilean General Water Department, the Chilean Department of Meteorology, the Chilean Agro-climate Network AGROMET, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Arid Zones (CEAZA), which are gathered and displayed on the Vismet web platform, belonging to the Center for Climate and Resilience Science (CR2). This technological development was possible thanks to the effort and dedication of the civil engineer and student of the Master’s program in Engineering Sciences, Rodrigo Marinao Rivas, who explained: “Mawün-NRT allows to close hydrometeorological information gaps. For this purpose, we integrated various sources of information from international and national centers in this platform, to obtain a more complete view of hydrometeorological events.“ Written by: Pamela Carrasco Salas, Innovation and Technology Transfer Office |
