SnapFlood

Description

Flooding, particularly in cities, has been getting much attention in recent times because of associated socio-economic consequences. To do any kind of scientific, engineering and policy relevant work, one important element to have is when and where flood happened, and how much water was there. Traditional methods were out there and are useful for riverine flooding but not for floods in cities. Unlike riverine floods, urban floods do exhibit great spatial and temporal variability highlighting the need for innovative methods of data recording. In this regard we, RAFT (Rainfall-runoff Analysis and Forecasting Tools) at IIT Hyderabad, are putting the efforts that allow us to raft through flood relevant challenges. One such innovative effort is SnapFlood, i.e., snap the flood relevant images highlighting flooded waters, flooded properties, etc, and then upload the images/videos. One can snap the images of the flood anywhere in the world, which over the time becomes a great flood archive and comes handy for both science, engineering and policy. Therefore, we encourage people to snap the flood in safe waters using SnapFlood.

The idea was developed when we were working on a project funded by the Government of India's Department of Science and Technology (DST-SPLICE, Climate Change Programme) National Network Programme on Urban Climate (NUC) as part of National Mission on Strategic Knowledge for Climate
Change (NMSKCC). The current efforts are funded by the Government of India’s ongoing project entitled AI CoE for sustainable cities.

Dr. Satish Regonda has been leading the efforts by having continuous discussions with Dr. Azharuddin M (when he was a student at IITH :) and Padmini P A (research scholar). The other team members, Surya Kiran G, Saipirya S R, Lagnajeet Roy, Mohan Raju M and Vamshi Raj M are potential contributors. Mobile application was developed by Varun Gupta (student at IIT Hyderabad). Happy snapping :-0)