Climate and Weather

This Civil Engineering Course under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) on the broad subject of Solids, Materials and their Mechanics has been developed by Indian Institute of Technology’s and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore as a collaborative project supported by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (Government of India) to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country, by developing curriculum based video and web courses. In these web based lectures, the authors have developed the subject in detail and in stages in a student-friendly manner.

Reports of floods, swelling of rivers continue from various parts of North India such as Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand. There have been reports of landslides in the Himalayas, Himachal Pradesh, especially Shimla where the tourism industry has suffered and tourists have been reported to be stranded because of floods and landslides. Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have been the worst hit with a high number of deaths due to monsoon and floods.

Agriculture/Watershed Development

• Scientists from Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Orissa have developed a new rice variety for water-logged areas
• Andhra's mammoth water harvesting program - 'Jalayagnam', sinks

I was going through weather data exposed by India Water Portal and I was thinking about an interesting application which would show my love to Bangalore. The best part of Bangalore is its temperature, rains and clouds. So I wrote this small app which uses the data provided by India Water Portal (which in turn is by CRU). IWP has data for all the districts in India, for every month and for multiple parameters. They have data for 100 years. It quite an amount of data to play with if you are interested. They have an easy way of filtering and downloading.

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.

After watching “developing world” video on TED, I was eager to try out Google visualization API. When I found the rain fall information, I thought its the best suited data to play around. Go check out the Visualization of Rain Fall in Karnataka.

The Eleventh Plan (2007-08 to 2011-12) sought to build on the gains achieved in the Tenth Plan and shift the economy to a path of faster and more inclusive growth. The Mid Term Appraisal (MTA) report for the Eleventh Five Year Plan 2007-2012  by the Planning Commission reviews the experience in the first three years of the Plan and seeks to identify areas where corrective steps may be needed.

Organizers:

We are proud to announce the video contest "Water, Climate and.....Action!"

Water, Climate and…..Action!  Enter your short film in the contest!