Today, all the developed countries in the world are using a variety of weather forecasting systems to assist disaster prevention, relief, and evacuation, to drastically reduce the number of casualties and the amount of economic loss caused by disastrous weather conditions. Adding the dynamic of cyber surveillance systems can greatly increase the accuracy of determining what areas could be hardest hit.
In August of 2017, millions of people were affected by heavy monsoon rains that unleased floods and landslides killing at least 175 people in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. Roughly eight percent of the crops were damaged. Six million people were affected by the floods in the country’s southern plains known as Terai. 
In Africa, recent heavy rains have caused the level of the Benue River in Nigeria to rise and overflow its banks. Reports indicate that 100,000 people may have been displaced by flooding. In early August through mid-September 2017, enhanced seasonal precipitation caused flooding and other adverse ground impacts. With well above moisture conditions in place, additional flooding is expected throughout parts of The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
In the US, by mid-September, the southern states had been hit by not one, but two catastrophic hurricanes. Both causing incredible amounts of flooding.
Hurricane Harvey stormed onto the shores of Texas on August 25th. The areal coverage of locations picking up at least 20 inches of rain was greater than the state of West Virginia, while the 40-inch-plus zone was larger than Delaware.
The impact of Hurricane Irma, while not as much rain fell, is still very damaging. The amount of flooding that occurred across the entire state of Florida will have an impact on the state for a long time.
Regional heavy rainfall is usually caused by the influence of extreme weather conditions. Instant heavy rainfall often results in the flooding of rivers and the neighboring low-lying areas, which is responsible for a large number of casualties and considerable property loss. The existing precipitation forecast systems mostly focus on the analysis and forecast of large-scale areas but do not provide precise instant automatic monitoring and alert feedback for individual river areas and sections.
These on-site stations can directly measure the water or rainfall levels and provide instant notifications. However, direct sensor measurement of the water level is restricted by the particular limitations of the sensor installation location and the unavoidable requirement of frequent maintenance. It also has the disadvantage of obtaining only water-level information and not visual evidence for judgment. Therefore, recently, the integration of flood monitoring systems and image processing techniques for flooding and inundation monitoring has become vital for flood disaster prevention.
Developing a visual flood monitoring system for near real-time flood overflow detection and flood risk evaluation can be done using a cyber surveillance system for instant flood monitoring and warning. The key advantage of this system is the introduction of a new video surveillance concept, in which the flood overflow is considered a monitoring object, and the risk level is determined on the basis of the number of preset warning points intruded by the flood object.
Using cyber surveillance systems can improve our monitoring and emergency warning abilities against flood overflow and inundation events, serving as a complement to the currently used quantitative precipitation forecasts and in-situ water-level measurements. It is also expected to provide more timely and accurate flood warning information to disaster relief units and the general public, in order to reduce the negative impacts of the flood disasters.
Universe Kogaku designs and manufactures optical lenses for cyber surveillance systems, security, high tech and electronic applications. We stock 1000’s of standard lens assemblies and can custom design a solution for scanners, CCTV, CCD/CMOS, medical imaging, surveillance systems, machine vision and night vision systems.