Floodbook: a social platform for flood hydrology

New technologies provide a new great source of information, increasing the available knowledge in many different fields, including hydrology. With this work we wish to share with the Hydroinformatics community an attempt in the direction of using the social media to increase the general understanding of the areas affected by flooding events in Italy. We have developed “Floodbook”, an online platform aimed at constituting a database for flood-damaged areas in Italy, trying to fill the knowledge gap of flood events occurring in small and ungauged basins. The platform invites citizens to contribute posting geotagged contents, photos or videos, on the social media; these contents are collected and elaborated to provide a clear, yet rigorous and comprehensive, picture of the event. Some case studies are described to show how this data collection can be used to improve flood extent assessment and flood dynamics reconstruction.