Urban Flood Nowcasting System (Drainage and Rainfall Coupling)

Official description

Urban flooding in major Indian metros like Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai has become an annual crisis. Traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models fall short because knowing how much rain will fall does not automatically translate into knowing where the streets will flood.Urban flooding is a hyper-local phenomenon dictated by micro-topography, concrete imperviousness, and heavily strained, invisible drainage networks. Currently, municipal bodies lack real-time, street-level predictive systems. Consequently, cities are caught off guard by rapid water accumulation, leading to severe traffic gridlocks, economic disruption, and loss of life. The challenge is to design a high-resolution, real-time Urban Flood Nowcasting System (0–3 hour lead time) capable of predicting street-level inundation before it happens. Participants must move away from isolated weather models and instead build a coupled framework. This system must fuse real-time rainfall nowcasts with high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEM) and a graph-based mathematical model of the city’s underground drainage network. By mapping how water flows, accumulates, and surcharges across concrete surfaces and drainage nodes, the solution should pinpoint exactly which streets or intersections will flood.Develop a pipeline that takes high-resolution rainfall nowcasts (from Doppler Weather Radars) and instantly routes that volume across a 2D surface terrain model. Represent the city's stormwater drain network as a directed graph (nodes as manholes/inlets, edges as pipes/canals). The model must calculate hydraulic capacity and predict where blockages or overcapacity will cause backflow onto the streets. A dynamic, web-based GIS dashboard showing real-time, street-by-street flooding projections (e.g., water depth estimations in centimeters) with a 0–3 hour forward-looking window.An API utility that can interface with navigation maps to suggest flood-safe alternative routes for emergency services, public transit, and commuters during heavy downpours.