Sutlej Flood Warning System
Client: Central Water Commission of India
Location: Northern India
Period: 2007 – 2008
Project Summary
Gage house on the Sutlej River
at the confluence with the Spiti River
India’s Central Water Commission needed a system to provide advance flood warning for the Sutlej River in Northern India. Riverside Technology, inc. installed RiverTrak® Sentry to provide real-time water level data for the Sutlej River to Central Water Commission engineers.
Project Details
Under contract to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Disaster Management Support (DMS) project in India, Riverside Technology, inc. (Riverside) was tasked with developing a system that provides warnings of critical flooding conditions on the Sutlej River in Northern India. The system, to be operated by Central Water Commission (CWC) engineers, will also provide advance flood warnings to operators at the Nathpa Jakhri Dam.
Riverside’s RiverTrak® Sentry system was chosen for the project. The system will ingest real-time water level data on the Sutlej River from Khab to Rampur. Those values will be compared to user-defined threshold values, and if a critical condition is detected, a warning will be disseminated based on that comparison.
The system includes a graphical user interface (GUI) through which the user can:
- Define and access the input data.
- Make adjustments to the data comparison procedures.
- Control the actions taken when a warning is warranted.
In the development of the Sutlej warning system, Riverside worked with USGS and CWC personnel to define functional requirements for the system including real-time data ingest, quality control checks, data manipulation including flow routing from river station to river station, and alarming actions. The system is designed to ingest real-time data from the river gages that are transmitted via the Indian National Satellite System (INSAT) to a receiving station at Jaipur then re-transmitted via a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) to Shimla where the system will reside. The data will be stored on a database within the system so that comparisons can be made with user-supplied thresholds.
Riverside developed a GUI to facilitate system set up and user interaction. Through the GUI, the user can define the components of the system (gages, river reaches, confluences, etc.), assign real-time data types to each location, enter threshold values for each location, and identify actions to occur if thresholds are exceeded. For the alarming and notification component of the software, the user can define specific actions to be taken by the RiverTrak® Sentry software when a threshold is exceeded. Examples of these actions include displaying an emergency message on the computer screen, or sending an e-mail or text message to a predetermined phone number.