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The Central Water Commission (CWC) has entered into a Collaboration Agreement with Google for flood forecasting.
“CWC would use state-of-the-art advances made by Google in the field of AI, Machine Learning and geo spatial mapping for effective management of water resources, particularly in the field of flood forecasting and dissemination of flood- related information to the masses with the dissemination platforms developed by Google,” said an official statement.
This initiative is likely to help crisis-management agenciesdeal extreme hydrological events in a better manner,” it added.
The CWC is India’s apex technical organisation in the field of Water Resources. At the Niti Aayog governing council meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured Chief Ministers from flood affected-States that the Centre would provide all assistance to them to deal with the flood situation currently affecting parts of the country.
There will also be a high-priority research project utilising the Google Earth Engine to help visualise and improve flood management and a cultural project to build online exhibitions on the Rivers of India.
The Ministry had earlier launched an ambitious programme ‘National Hydrology Project’ (NHP) during the year 2016-2017. NHP is a World Bank-assisted central sector scheme with pan-India coverage. The objective of the 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/planning and to strengthen the capacity of targeted water resources professionals and management institutions in India.
It is also likely to address the long-pending demand of the inhabitants of flood-prone areas for inundation warnings with sufficient lead time.
Under the collaborative arrangement, Google will use a high-resolution Digital Elevation Model and vast computational resources to generate flood inundation maps utilising the level forecast input provided by the CWC.
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