Kazuhiko FUKAMI - International Centre for Water Hazard and Risk Management under the auspices of UNESCO (ICHARM),Public Works Research Institute (PWRI
Seishi NABESAKA - ICHARM, PWRI
Mamoru MIYAMOTO - ICHARM, PWRI
Ai SUGIURA - ICHARM, PWRI

Water-related disaster is one of the challenges that need to be overcome to achieve sustainable development and poverty reduction. Their effect is increasing with population growth and concentration and increasing value of assets in flood plains in recent years. In countries where river improvements are not sufficient, smooth evacuation from flooding is important for limiting the loss of life and property. The timing and magnitude of flooding should be clearly identified in advance. Such information should be the minimal requirement so that the living with floods concept is tolerable. However, in reality, we still have many flood-prone areas without any effective flood forecasting / warning systems. The failure of theirimplementations mainly lies on the lack of hydrological data and in particular rainfalldata both quantitatively and qualitatively. This is the reason which motivated the development of the IFAS (Integrated Flood Analysis System) with rainfall-runoff models which can run based on global and freely available geographical and rainfall data and with a very limited amount of field data. IFAS is a freely distributed comprehensive toolkit including 1) the modeling of any river basin based on global geographical data (DEM and land use data available freely online), 2) the possibilityto input not only ground-based rainfall data but also satellite-based ones to analyze flood runoff and finally 3) the display of results to be analyzed for flood warning. Some applications of IFAS in poorly-gauged rivers in developing countries are introduced.

Early warning, flood runoff analysis, distributed-parameter hydrologic model, satellite-based rainfall, GSMaP