A smartphone application to help alert in case of flash floods

In France, government and specific services (SCHAPI) survey overflow stream floods (100.000km²) but flash floods characterized by fast, quick and dangerous responses (other 100.000km²) remain delicate to predict and difficult to monitor. It´s about to explore the conditions of establishment of a proactive and innovative alert system via smartphones, to cope the risks associated with flash floods. The solution must be thought in way to achieve a major challenge: reducing the gap between a state approach (TOP-DOWN), which positions and imposed the state as the main official alert source, and the citizen action (Bottum-UP) which establishes the individual as “Citizen sensor” (both in go up or disseminate information) through the use of its smartphone. Addressing this challenge is indispensable if we hope effectively minimize material and human damages especially when high temporal acuity phenomena such as flash floods happen. Consequently, we propose to use Smartphone technologies: to reduce the time required to alert and to protect population; to enhance information observed by any people at local scales; to built automatic vigilance based on these “citizens-sensors”; to use field experiment to improve knowledge on flash floods actually available after damaged events; to use geo-location of transmitter sources to alert people located at 5 km around.