NEW DELHI: Union Jal Shakti Minister C R Patil on Wednesday inaugurated C-FLOOD, a web-based Unified Inundation Forecasting System jointly developed by the Central Water Commission (CWC) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune.
The system will revolutionise flood preparedness and response in India. The launch took place at Shram Shakti Bhawan, New Delhi, in the presence of high-ranking officials from the Ministry of Jal Shakti, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
C-FLOOD is to offer pre-inundation warnings up to two days in advance at the village level. It gives high-resolution flood inundation maps and water level predictions of rivers, providing critical assistance to disaster management organisations for early warnings and mitigation planning. The system is a significant contribution towards the strengthening of the disaster resilience and climate adaptation infrastructure of the government.
Presently extending over the Mahanadi, Godavari, and Tapi river basins, C-FLOOD synthesises modelling inputs of national and regional agencies in one platform. Simulations for the Mahanadi basin are run with high-end 2-D hydrodynamic modelling on High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities at C-DAC Pune.
Predictions for the Godavari and Tapi basins, prepared by the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) under the National Hydrology Project, are also included in the consolidated system.
The platform, designed with the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), jointly guided by MeitY and DST, is envisioned as a critical decision-support system for flood management.
The minister asked CWC and the concerned stakeholders to popularise the C-FLOOD system to enhance public preparedness and awareness. He also underlined the need for incorporating forecasts into the National Disaster Management Emergency Response Portal (NDEM) and ground-truthing and satellite validation to enhance forecast accuracy.