Central Water Commission to set up 40 flood forecasting stations

Development comes at a time Tamil Nadu, especially Chennai, witnessed one of the worst floods; 14 stations to come up in TN

Central Water Commission (CWC) under Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation will set up 40 flood forecasting stations. Majority of which coming in Tamil Nadu, which saw worst rain and flood in the last one moth.

According to PIB release for the first time in the States of Arunachal Pradesh (3), Himachal Pradesh (1), Kerala (2), Rajasthan (12), Sikkim (8) and Tamil Nadu (14) during the current five year plan. In addition to this 60 more flood forecasting stations will be set up in other States already having flood forecasting stations to cover their uncovered areas.

Central Water Commission (CWC) has, inter-alia, been entrusted with flood forecasting activities in India.

A network of 878 stations on major rivers and their tributaries has been set up.

Presently, flood forecasts are issued for 176 stations (148 level forecast and 28 inflow forecast) using hydrological data from its own network and Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) received from Flood Metrological Organization (FMO) of India Metrological Department (IMD). The existing flood forecasting network of CWC covers 19 states/UTs/NCT, 10 major river basins and 72 sub-basins, according to PIB release.

So far, 445 stations have been modernised with automatic data collection and transmission systems. Mathematical models on rivers Jhelum, Alaknanda, Bhagirathi, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Yamuna, Chambal, Baitarani, Vamsadhara, Subarnarekha, Mahanadi, Tapi, Godavari and Krishna have been developed. The forecast is disseminated using the email, SMS and website facilities.

"The modernisation of network includes installation of automatic sensor based data collection and satellite based data transmission systems for near real time flood forecasting and development of medium range hydrologic and hydraulic models with a warning time of upto 72 hours using one dimensional mathematical modeling tools, for effective flood forecasting," said in the release.

The Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation had launched new flood forecasting website e-Surface Water Information System (e-SWIS) during the flood season of 2014, which has facilitated timely forecast dissemination through email/SMS.

The trends of river water levels at the forecasting stations of the network during the last 72 hours are also made available to the general public at the web portal (http://india-water.gov.in//ffs).In addition, flood-warning messages are also disseminated using Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) of Google to make the warning more effective, it was further added.