NIT Warangal has been sanctioned 10 projects under the prestigious Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, worth about Rs. 5 crore. These projects are in collaboration with USA, UK, Australia, Singapore, Canada and Taiwan.
As part of the SPARC Project on ‘Real-time Forecasting of Floods Using SWAT model’ between NIT Warangal, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA, Prof. (Dr). Venkata Ramana Sridhar from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA, is visiting the Institute for a week to initiate the project.
A two-day initiation workshop began at NIT here on Wednesday. Director, Prof. N. V. Ramana Rao, Institute SPARC coordinator Prof. K. V. Jayakumar, Civil HoD Prof. M. Chandrasekhar, Coordinators and Investigators of the project Dr. K. Venkata Reddy and Prof. N. V. Umamahesh participated in the inaugural. Prof Jayakumar explained how the SPARC projects were allotted to the NITW.
“Among the NITs in the country, NITW got the maximum number of SPARC projects. This two-day workshop is to discuss the Hydrological and Water Resources Modelling of River Basins under Climate Change Scenarios,” he said.
The project, with an outlay of Rs. 81.76 lakh has Dr. K. Venkata Reddy from the Indian side and Prof. Raghavan Srinivasan from USA as Principal Investigators. Prof. N.V. Umamahesh, Prof. Deva Pratap and Dr. Y. Navatha from India and Dr. Venkata Ramana Sridhar from USA are the Co-PIs of the project. Prof. K. V. Jayakumar, Dean IR&AA is the institute coordinator of the SPARC programme.
Flood forecasting
As an outcome of this project, an approach for forecast of floods and to provide timely information to the end-user and an open web-interface will be developed. It will have functionalities of visualising streamflow, corresponding flood inundation maps and inundation depths in near real-time. Dissemination of the research results will be done through the dedicated monograph, workshop, and user conference.
The US team will stay for two months from October through November, and work on the project.