UBD|IBM Centre conducts 4th flood forecasting workshop
| Hamidah Ismail |
THE UBD|IBM Centre of Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) recently organised a flood forecasting workshop in its office at the Knowledge Hub in Anggerek Desa. It was the fourth in a series of forecasting workshops held since early last year.
Workshop’s participants engaged in practical activities guided by Dr Lucas Villa Real. PHOTOS: HAMIDAH ISMAIL
The workshop was meant to bring together engineers and researchers to learn certain coupled meteorology-hydrology models and its applications using UBD’s super-computing facilities.
Through it, the relevant stake-holders would be able to address and tackle the challenges associated with the planning and development of strategies for better environmental management, particularly those associated with floods.
The workshop, held Saturday, was facilitated Dr Lucas Villa Real of IBM Research, Brazil, and consisted of lectures, discussions and practical activities on the applications of special tools and GIS software, such as GRASS and Quantum.
According to Dr Lucas, the tools are used to process and ‘make sense’ of the data collected by LiDAR.
Dr Lucas also touched on the types of data that can be obtained from a LiDAR dataset.
LiDAR is an optical remote sensing technology that collects properties of objects on the ground that it illuminates by means of laser.
The workshop was the continuation of a previous workshop which focused on the hydrology concept, analysis, flood routing and run-off, surface routing, hydrological and hydraulic models, channel flows as well as practical activities using modelling programmes such as the SPRINT model and HEC-RAS facilitated by another researcher from the IBM Research Lab in Austin, Texas.
Vannessa Teo, a PhD student under the UBD|IBM Centre, said the workshop will be very useful for her PhD research work on crop modelling as she needs information and characteristics of soil conditions, among others.
According to Dr Saiful Azmi Hj Husain, the Deputy Director of UBD|IBM Centre, such a workshop was also part of their initiatives to engage more local stakeholders from relevant ministries to collaborate with the centre’s projects as well as to assist the ministries in developing human capacity building.
Participants of the one-day workshop consisted of personnel from the Survey Department as well as PhD students under the UBD|IBM Centre.
