Call for Action!

A few hundred to several thousand people die every year from annual monsoon flooding in the Ganges-Brahmaputra river delta. There is always a few days of lead time between the rainfall and the flooding that results from all these rainfall. Also, from upstream most point in a river to downstream point, there is "some" time available for the river stage to get to dangerous levels. I am thinking of a real time flood warning system based on input either from various local weather stations or common people equipped with mobile phones to call back the "system" and based on those input, a warning SMS or a voice instructions can be broadcasted back in real time.

I do see a great potential and a possible interests from governments for something like this. The Rainfall-Runoff modeling field of hydrology is fairly well advanced and science part of the prediction can be taken to new heights if enough interest is generated from right sources.

While working on our initial assignment, our group came up with an idea INFOClime - a basic structure of many to many broadcast system with an added web form interface for real time information sharing. We were also thinking of a very simple menu system with numbers to retrieve the information from the system. I don't see why this set up cannot be used for this application.