Technical Assistance for Flood Forecasting and Early Warning System
under PHARE project "Capacity Improvement for Flood Forecasting in the BG-TR CBC Region".

This project is part of the more global European PHARE project "Capacity Improvement for Flood Forecasting in the Bulgarian-Turkey Cross Border Cooperation Region". Its realisation has been entrusted by the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works to the consortium "BCEOM société d'Ingénierie" & "HKV Consultants" from France and Holland with the participation of Bulgarian experts and the support of the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (NIMH) and the East Aegean River Basin Directorate of the Ministry of Environment and Water. It started officially on October 2^nd.

The project developed an operational information system for flood analysis, flood mapping and flood forecasting which will help mitigate in the future the flood consequences along the Maritza and Tundja, and provides on time information to authorities from Bulgaria and Turkey in charge of alerting the population and of managing the operations during the flood events.

The main activities and results of the project have been:

• Flood genesis study by analysis of the historical hydro meteorological data provided by NIMH. Scenarios of 20 , 100 and 1000 years return period floods have been produced on main rivers;
• Geographical and topographical data collection including 4 months of survey works of the rivers for integration within a geographical database with recommendations for harmonization and interoperability with Turkish dataset;
• The set up of an integrated hydrological-hydraulic model using the software platform Mike 11 provided through a parallel supply contract in the same program: the models have been calibrated and validated with recent historical data and account for dam and reservoir management rules to simulate floods.
• The production of informative flood maps from model results applied on the above scenarios which may be accounted for by municipality for their urban policy.
• The build up of an operational Flood forecasting system based upon the software Mike Flood Watch which interfaces with the hydraulic and hydrologic models and real time data acquisition processes. The system implements the alert/alarm processes and procedures.
• A Web platform setup for information dissemination about floods in the basin, connected to the forecast outputs.
• Training of Bulgarian experts from the beneficiary teams for capacity building along the whole project: The Beneficiary experts are trained in order to take over the project follow-ons and upgrade the models and the flood forecasting platform.

Project Team Main Key Experts :

• Jean Michel Roques : Team Leader ; Hydrologist, Hydraulic and computer science Engineer
• Nikolay Lissev : Deputy Team leader ; Hydraulic Engineer and Professor
• Job Udo : Hydro-modelling Expert
• Vassil Vassilev : GIS Expert

A team of nine geodesists and surveyors from Bulgaria participated also in the project as well as several Non Key experts from EGIS BCEOM or HKV Consultants.

With huge amounts of energy, the project could be achieved in time, despite all odds…
Thanks to the Team!