Workshop at NIT Warangal on real time forecasting of floods

Hyderabad: NIT Warangal has been sanctioned a total of 10 projects under the prestigious Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, worth about Rs.5.00 crore.

These projects are in collaboration with USA, UK, Australia, Singapore, Canada and Taiwan. As part of the SPARC Project on 'Real-time Forecasting of Floods Using SWAT model' between NIT Warangal, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA, Prof. Dr. Venkata Ramana Sridhar from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA is visiting to the Institute for one week to initiate the project. A 2-day initiation workshop began at NIT on Wednesday .

Director, Prof. N. V. Ramana Rao, Institute SPARC coordinator Prof. K. V. Jayakumar, Civil HOD Prof. M. Chandrasekhar, Coordinators and Investigators of the project Dr. K. Venkata Reddy and Prof. N. V. Umamahesh participated in the inaugural of the workshop. Prof Jayakumar explained about the details of how the SPARC projects were allotted to the NITW. Among the NITs in the country, NITW got the maximum number of SPARC projects. This two-day workshop is to discuss the Hydrological and Water Resources Modelling of River Basins under Climate Change Scenarios.

This project has an outlay of Rs 81.76 lakh. Dr. K. Venkata Reddy from Indian side and Prof. Raghavan Srinivasan from USA are the Principal Investigators. Prof. N.V. Umamahesh, Prof. Deva Pratap and Dr. Y. Navatha from Indian side and Dr. Venkata Ramana Sridhar from USA are the Co-PIs of the project. Prof. K. V. Jayakumar, Dean IR&AA is the institute coordinator of the SPARC programme.

As an outcome of this SPARC project, an approach for forecast the floods and to provide the timely information to the end user and an open web-interface will be developed with the functionalities of visualizing streamflow, corresponding flood inundation maps and inundation depths in near real-time. Dissemination of the research results will be done through the dedicated monograph, workshop, and user conference. In the months of October and November, USA team will stay for two months and work on the project.