Flood Mapping and Prediction

Project Proposal: Somanshu Rath (2022A7PS0032G)
Hackenza 2024 Problem Statement 1 under Prof. Neena Goveas.

Links to project’s demo:
https://somanshurath.github.io/flood-mapping/
https://github.com/somanshurath/flood-mapping/

Problem Statement

You've got a map of a city and you want to make a digital version of it. Imagine drawing lines for streets and marking where they meet as dots. These dots are like intersections or junctions, where roads cross. The lines between these dots represent the roads themselves.

Now, you want to add something extra to this map: water levels on each road. Imagine it's raining. and some roads might flood with water. You need a way to record how deep the water gets on each road.

To make things easier, use your own data source (mock data or open source). Once we have the water levels, we want to see this on our map. We could make something like Google Maps to show our map with the water levels marked on each road. But what if we don't have data for every road? Well, we can estimate the missing water levels by looking at the water levels of nearby roads and taking an average. This way, even if we don't have data for every single road, we can still have a good idea of how flooded the area might be.

Plan of Approach

So far, a dummy webpage has been made by me, to display what the end result might look like. Instead of the regular map, we will display the Flooded Roads and areas with prominent flooding during the monsoon season. For working on this problem, I chose to start with the city of Mumbai, because

A) I am from Mumbai and have myself experiences flooded roads and cut off transport lines during monsoon and
B) Rains and monsoon road flooding is very synonymous with Mumbai and various data and studies have been done which can be utilized to make early versions of the project in the city.

Areas like Matunga and Dadar get filled first to get water-logged, followed by some other parts of the city. This problem occurs also because of high tides on some days in Mumbai, owing to which drainage to the sea does not take place.

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Starting off with the problem, our entire solution will be based on QGIS, which stands for Quantum Geographic Information System, is a free and open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) software application.

Using this software, we will create a custom layer on top of the Standard OSM (Open Street Map) layer which we can pull out using QuickMapServices. Once a similar rendition is made, we can use the data available to put it in our custom layer. I plan to look into the following data categories:

1. Observed station based daily accumulated rainfall information.
   
2. Volunteered geographic information (one of the most reliable among the other crowdsourced information).
3. Height Above the Nearest Drainage (HAND) map data values across Mumbai.
   

(These data sources were gathered mainly from these research papers and articles. Link here, here, and here)

Also by looking at active participation of Mumbaikars during historically significant rainy days, i would like to look at the Ward-wise Tweets received. These data are all available on the internet using which I will incorporate in our newly made map layer. This layer of map will contain the following information:

1. Estimated amount of rainfall received in that vicinity.
2. Estimated quality of drainage
3. Overall “road-waterlog-ability”

This project would be useful in many avenues.
- Helping administratives plant water pump motors and/or temporary water storage trucks so as to keep the city that never stops from stopping…
- Planning out travel routes during monsoon.
- Study the overall geography of Mumbai.

This project can with time be expanded to include other major cities and river bed areas to help with preventing water flooding during Monsoons and planning construction of structures along river banks…

Conclusion

Given the opportunity, I will try my level best to carry out the tasks required and mentioned above, to create a model to predict and display the water-logged levels in a city, which here has been taken as Mumbai. I will adapt to the challenges and carry out the project even if an approach may fail to come to practicality and might need to be solved by a different method.

Thank You.