SDGs Award: "3-Day Advisory Flood Forecast System of Central Water Commission (CWC), Govt. of India"

The 204th GRIPS Forum (SDGs Award) "3-Day Advisory Flood Forecast System of Central Water Commission (CWC), Govt. of India"

Date: June 20 (MON), 2022
Speaker: Mr. Mohammad Faiz Syed (Superintending Engineer, Central Water Commission, Government of India)
Title: 3-Day Advisory Flood Forecast System of Central Water Commission (CWC), Govt. of India

Abstract:
Flood is the most common natural disaster in India. According to estimates, on an average, every year 75 lakh hectares of land is affected, 1600 lives are lost, and the damage caused to crops, houses and public utilities is over 1805 crores. To cope with this enormous damage caused by floods in the country, Government of India relies heavily on flood forecasting as one of the non-structural measures.

The conventional flood forecasting by Central Water Commission (CWC) is done through gauge-to-gauge correlation method, a statistical technique with a major in-built drawback of limited and fixed warning time (not more than 24hrs in India). It is done manually and hence it is time taking. To overcome such limitations, CWC introduced a rainfall based hydrological modelling technique for flood forecasting in 2017 through its three-day-advisory-flood-forecast-system. This system is sturdy, durable, and sustainable. It has been performing very well since 2017 and has operated successfully for all the past five flood seasons. It has been developed totally in-house by CWC officers and caters to the popular demand for longer warning time by increasing it to 72 hrs.

The system uses both hydrologic (rainfall-runoff) and hydrodynamic modelling engines for real-time water level and inflow prediction for all the 325 forecasting stations in the country. The system works in fully automatic fashion without any human intervention. It generates more than 2700 forecasts in a day which are easily accessible on a dedicated GIS platform.