Flood forecast alerts are provided by Central Water Commission. They have boring maps and tables. Also they don’t provide data in program accessible format. Members of ICTD for asia are working on parsing and storing that data. In the meantime I wanted something to play. I found ScraperWiki (hacker news discussion) which can be used to scrape data from any page and schedule it for running. It allows php, python and ruby languages. Its easy and gives lot more flexibility than Y! pipes to scrape that data. Here is my scraper to get the flood data. You will have to register to get an API to use the data. Data is available in JSON, XML, PHP etc.
By the time I scraped the data, it was late. I couldn’t think so I used Google chart API to display simple dashboard. Probably tomorrow, I should be able to use the parsed data in a better way.
Anyway go ahead and have a look at finished Flood Forecast Alert System. Let me know your comments or creative ideas to visualize it.