The project FloodCastCL: A flood early warning system for critical catchments in Chile, led by civil engineer Héctor Garcés-Figueroa, has been awarded funding through the 2026 Valorización de la Investigación en la Universidad (VIU) competition of Chile’s National Research and Development Agency (ANID), with Universidad de La Frontera as the beneficiary institution.
FloodCastCL grew out of the undergraduate thesis that Garcés-Figueroa completed to earn his Civil Engineering degree at Universidad de La Frontera. The VIU funding will support the project’s continued development and help transform its research results into a science- and technology-based solution with practical potential for flood-risk management.
The project’s main objective is to validate the performance of a flood early warning system that combines hydrological modelling with bias-corrected gridded weather forecasts in catchments located between Chile’s Maule and Los Lagos regions. Over its 12-month implementation period, the project will seek to advance from technology readiness level TRL 3 to TRL 4 by validating its components under near-operational conditions.
In doing so, FloodCastCL aims to help shift flood-risk management from a reactive approach towards a preventive one, providing tools that can anticipate catchment-scale responses to extreme hydrometeorological events.
Héctor Garcés-Figueroa presenting FloodCastCL at the Third Hydrology Conference.
The project is supported by Dr Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini and Dr Alexis Caro, as well as by the Municipality of Curarrehue. This partnership will help connect the project’s development with a territory where anticipating and managing flood hazards is particularly important.
Garcés-Figueroa is also a collaborator at the Kimün-Ko Water Resources Observatory of La Araucanía, where he has actively contributed to initiatives involving water resources, hydrological modelling and the study of extreme hydrometeorological events.
FloodCastCL was selected through a highly competitive national call: only 45 of the 314 submitted projects received funding. Five of the selected initiatives are from Universidad de La Frontera, placing UFRO jointly first in Chile for the number of funded projects, alongside Universidad del Bío-Bío and Universidad de Talca.
The award allows FloodCastCL to continue a line of work that began during Garcés-Figueroa’s undergraduate studies and to move towards validating a tool designed to strengthen anticipation and preventive flood-risk management in Chilean catchments.