Working as an alerting brigade, Center teams up with Google for flood forecasting

NewsBharati    19-Jun-2018
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New Delhi, June 19: In a new move to tackle issues pertaining to flood, the government has decided to team up with Google for effective flood management in India. The Central Water Commission (CWC), India’s apex technical organization in the field of Water Resources, has entered into a Collaboration Agreement with Google.

In accordance with the Central Water Commission, it would use Google’s advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and geospatial mapping for effective management of water resources. This is particularly in the field of flood forecasting and dissemination of flood-related information to the masses widely using the dissemination platforms developed by Google.

 

The initiative is likely to help crisis management agencies to deal with extreme hydrological events in a better way. This will help improve flood prediction systems, which will help provide location-targeted, actionable flood warnings, high priority research project utilizing Google Earth Engine to help visualize and improve flood management and a cultural project to build online exhibitions on the Rivers of India.

The ministry had earlier launched ‘National Hydrology Project’ (NHP) programme during the year 2016-17. NHP is a World Bank-assisted central sector scheme with pan India coverage.

The objective of National Hydrology Project is to improve the extent, quality, and accessibility of water resources information, decision support system for floods and basin level resource assessment and planning and to strengthen the capacity of targeted water resources professionals and management institutions in India.

An experimental version of the exercise will likely begin this monsoon and said the IMD meteorologist will be offered “free of cost” as part of the company’s “Corporate Social Responsibility.” For the flood season of 2018, flood forecasting would be done on trial basis and the same would be upscaled in near future.

This collaboration would enable the Government as well as disaster management organizations to identify well in advance the locations and population, which are at risk from floods and require warnings and information. This collaborative initiative is expected to be a milestone in flood management and in mitigating the flood losses.