Monsoon School on Urban Floods - 2018

About:

Interdisciplinary Center for Water Research (ICWaR), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore in collaboration with Knowledge Societies Division UNESCO, Paris, organised a one-week Monsoon School on Urban Floods during 05 – 10 August, 2019. The School was supported by UNESCO and partially funded by the research project entitled, “Urban Flood Model for Bangalore“, sponsored by Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India. The School comprised of lectures and tutorials by experts, covering topics of urban meteorology, urban hydrology, radar and remote sensing analysis of rain events, monsoon and extreme precipitation dynamics, urban groundwater, engineering practices and post-flood responses. Group discussions were arranged to bring out the relevance of the state-of-the-art tools and methodologies for managing urban floods in Indian cities. The School targeted the practicing engineers and young researchers working with government or private bodies and educational institutes.

Venue for the Lectures and Tutorials: Lecture Hall, Interdisciplinary Center for Water Research (ICWaR)

Overview of the event: The event consisted of 39 participants from India and neighboring country Nepal. Prof. Dev Niyogi from Purdue University and Dr. Bhanu Neupane from UNESCO, Paris joined the workshop as resource persons. Indian speakers, Prof. D Nagesh Kumar, Prof. M Sekhar, Prof. MS Mohan Kumar, Prof. P P Mujumdar, Prof. V V Srinivas, Dr. J Indu and Dr. Subimal Ghosh delivered lectures on different topics related to urban floods.

The participants of the workshop came from different backgrounds. Young faculty members, research scholars and graduate students from different educational institutes; Scientists researchers from Symbiosis Institute of Geo-informatics, various NITs and IITs, WRIDD and WRRDC, Government of Nepal, and practitioners from private organizations and freelancers joined the workshop. This versatile group of participants helped to develop a very dynamic learning process through the workshop.

Each day of the workshop was divided into two sessions. In the morning sessions, lectures were conducted and in the afternoon sessions, tutorials, short assignments on the topics covered were given, group discussions were arranged etc. A visit to KSNDMC was organized on 9^th August, 2019 in the afternoon session of the workshop. All the participants visited KSNDMC office where the officials described the functioning of flood early warning systems, telemetric rain gauges and other weather monitoring instruments to the participants.