The paper “Aligning and Assimilating Multi-source Data for Flood Forecasting” received the Best Workshop Paper Award at ICCS 2026, the 26th International Conference on Computational Science, held at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, from 29 June to 1 July 2026.
The paper was authored by Kun Wang, Gabriele Bertoli, Sibo Cheng, Kai Schröter, Enrica Caporali, Matthew D. Piggott, Yanghua Wang, and Rossella Arcucci. Gabriele Bertoli, PhD alumnus of DICEA, there supervised by Prof. Enrica Caporali, contributed as co-first author.
The award places the work among the leading contributions to the ICCS Workshops on Computational Science, a programme that in 2026 brought together 23 thematic workshops spanning areas such as high-performance computing, machine learning, data assimilation, computational health, quantum computing, and scientific simulation.
The awarded study addresses a key challenge in flood forecasting: the limited availability of high-quality, spatially and temporally consistent data. To support more reliable forecasting, the authors developed and integrated multi-source datasets from EFAS, EMO-1, and LamaH-CE, combining meteorological, remote sensing, hydrological, and topographic information. The paper also introduces two test cases, including a two-dimensional forecasting experiment and a data assimilation experiment, providing a foundation for future research in machine learning and data assimilation for flood prediction.
ICCS 2026 was hosted by DESY, one of the world’s leading accelerator research centres and a major international hub for data-intensive science. The conference theme, “At the Forefront of Science through Computation and Data”, reflected the role of computational methods in advancing research across science and engineering.