Development of a web-based Flood Early Warning System Prototype in Nigeria

In order to disseminate flood alerts to people in Nigeria, a prototype of a web-based Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) was developed in this paper so as to send flood alerts to people especially those living in flood-prone remote areas.Records of flood occurrences in all the 36 states of Nigeria from 2000 to 2022 were extracted from the Emergency events Database of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, Brussels, Belgium.The results were presented based on location as the Nigerian coastline states and six geopolitical zones.The emergency events database showed both the origin and location of the floods wherever possible.The web-based FEWS was hosted online and developed using HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL programming languages.A Short Message Service (SMS) gateway was also integrated into the website.This research work provided a FEWS prototype for information dissemination when a flood is imminent or already occurring limiting damage and loss of life in Nigeria.