Advanced Infrastructure for Environmental Monitoring and Early-Warning System Integration

In order to increase the resilience of the regional territory to extreme rainfall phenomena, LepidaSpA has enhanced an already existing IOT platform, Sensornet, created to manage heterogeneous sensor networks extended all over the entire territory of the Emilia-Romagna Region, introducing some new “virtual sensors” [1] not related to physical measures, such as rivers level or amount of rainfall, but to their estimation and forecast. The ability to manage both real and “virtual sensors” grants the possibility to integrate conventional monitoring systems, based on observed data, with innovative ones, based on estimated and forecast data, providing an advanced monitoring infrastructure not only capable to monitor the phenomena and their evolution, with greater accuracy and spatial distribution, but also to generate early warning in case of critical thresholds with a forecast up to 12/24 h, according to the simulation model used for forecast.