A Near Real-time Early Warning System on Erosion Hazards
Titel:
A Near Real-time Early Warning System on Erosion Hazards
Auteur:
Faisal Hj. Ali Tew Kia Hui
Verschenen in:
American journal of environmental sciences
Paginering:
Jaargang 2 (2006) nr. 4 pagina's 146-153
Jaar:
2006
Inhoud:
With many incidences of landslides, mudslides and erosion occurrences lately, especially inthe highlands in Malaysia, properties were damaged and lives were lost. Seeing the need of resolving andminimizing such untoward incidences, a study has been embarked on developing a near real-time earlywarning system on erosion hazards so as to provide an early warning to the public, whenever there aresigns and probable occurrence of such incidences. Consequently, a case study on Cameron HighlandsCatchment was carried out, which involved a detailed baseline database of the study area to be set upfirst. The highland catchment is considered an environmentally sensitive area where many landdevelopment for various activities such as agriculture, agro-tourism, property development and road-wideningprojects, had already been carried out and some are still on going as to-date. To develop thebaseline database, acquisition of the latest Structure Plan, Satellite Imagery, topographical and rainfallinformation of the catchment area were carried out. Once this is done, real-time rainfall informationwould be adopted to develop the early warning system. This could be done by using solar-powered rainsensors, which would be triggered based on the rainfall amount and intensity. A SIM-card based GPRStransmitter, which is attached to the “rain sensing and transmission unit” would then send out e-mails atevery minute interval, so that the data could be transferred to a receiving unit. At this point, the e-mail isread and data is processed within the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) using an automatedkeyboard simulation programme. The final processed values would then be set against the thresholdvalues, which will trigger an early warning if any of the values exceeds the threshold limits. Therefore, itis hoped that the application of this new locally developed system, which has been trademarked underthe name EWARNS TM (Early Warning And Risk Navigation Systems), would be beneficial to the localauthorities, highway operators and the public in general in providing an early warning especially duringperiods of heavy rainfall, which could possibly trigger serious soil erosion occurrences that may inducelandslides.
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