Like many other cities in India, Mumbai has experienced frequent extreme rainfall events leading to severe floods and waterlogging in the last decade. However, researchers are unable to monitor the flood situation in real time due to lack of any system that captures such data. Now, a team of researchers led by IIT Bombay has found a way to achieve this — they turned to Twitter to crowdsource data to identify in real time areas that are water logged after heavy rainfall.
The results of the study, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, have been posted in arXiv, a preprint server.
The team led by Dr. Subimal Ghosh from the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay used an automated programme to retrieve flood-related data from Twitter. Using approximate level of water logging and location information, they were able to provide real-time information about flooding in Mumbai. The automated system to collect vital flood-related information from Twitter began last year making it possible to monitor floods in real time.
