Concept brief
I thought it would be great to address an IT system that can save lives of the people in flood affected areas. Below is the concept, which I briefly worked on with a very basic study and research around the human habitat conditions in the flood affected areas as well as technologies those can help to process the data in order to generate early alerts. I also came up with some info-graphics to explain the concept as much detail as possible. This concept can be detailed-out further if this gets the green signal at any point of time for the implementation.
Geological condition like ‘intense rainfall’, ‘hilly terrains’ and ‘lack of information’ some times wounded the state by the merciless floods. Andhra Pradesh has evidenced several cruel floods in the past and scared many people and even the environment. I have started thinking there could be an automated IT system which can generate well-in-advance flood alerts in order to alert the govt. to manage the water levels for saving the people and environment from the floods.
My short study proves that using available technology and information, AP govt. can develop a system that can process the captured volume of the rainfall and reservoir water levels based on the terrain and can generate the alerts well-in-advance (far before the water gets accumulated in the reservoirs).
I have briefly analyzed and illustrated the scenario how the flood water washes-off the human habitat. The below sketch explains the geological conditions of the human habitat at the flood affected areas.
Natural conditions of the “human habitat”
Conditions of the floods over “human habitat”As per my short research, there are three parameters to consider for the causes of the floods “terrain”, “rainfall” and “water levels of the reservoirs”. I guess all these parameters are digitally captured and might be used individually. the source technologies for capturing the information of these parameters are “Geological information system for reading the terrain”, "Weather-reporting system for capturing the rainfall and location" and "Water levels might be captured at the projects, which can be automated when required". Using these three parameters it is quite viable to process the "rainwater flow direction", "target reservoir that rainwater is going to hit" and "volume of flood water that is going to get accumulated in the reservoir". Integrating all these source technologies to develop an automated flood alerting system will be a lives saver for the flood effected areas of Andhra Pradesh.
Sources of the information
Implementation
As I explained earlier, the integration of Geographical Information System, Weather Reporting System are the basic required technologies to implement this application and there should be a connection between the water levels information across all the projects in the state. Capturing water-level information of the projects can be automated by introducing a new system using water sensor technology.
The below illustration briefly explains how the system captures the geographical information (terrain), weather reports (rainfall), reservoir water levels and how the system sends the alerts to the concern authorities.
Capturing the real-time data
When the weather report identifies rainfall at the hilly terrains (sources of the river water), system analyses where the rainfall is going to get accumulated. If system predicts that the floodwater can make the target reservoir more then the maximum water level, system sends the alerts to the concern authorities.
Analysis on how system process the source information into an "ALERT"