New flood alert system in Northeast soon

Come monsoon and a new flood monitoring system, aided by microwave remote sensing, will come up along the Brahmaputra basin in the Northeast to help plan and execute efficient emergency response measures.

The Centrally-funded project, executed by the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), aims at a new object-oriented strategy to attempt "near-real time" flood monitoring in the Brahmaputra basin with the help of microwave remote sensing system that can penetrate clouds.

"The system can provide information on the status of land use, soil protective cover and water level. The information can be translated into parameters and coefficients that hydrological models can use for run-off and flood forecasting," Yogesh Singh, project leader of CDAC, said.

Floods in Assam are an annual phenomenon causing massive destruction to life and property, mostly due to lack of efficient mitigation measures.

The new system will delineate the inundation or rise in surface water level as soon as it occurs and help alert the place of occurrence as well as downstream.

Flood damage assessment would be a key feature of the project.

"The new system is expected to provide timely information up to the block-level at villages and help reduce, manage and control the increasing extent of the disaster. The
information would be provided within 24 hours of any rise in water level," Singh said.

The web-based data information system is likely to be installed in a year. While initially the data would be provided only specific to the Northeast, the CDAC proposes to
expand its scope by putting in place a system that can collect data from the parts adjacent to China as well.