Category Archives: Rain Water

Rain Water

Data On the Ground: Crosspost from India Water Portal

From India Water Portal.  Communities using planning, data and collaboration to take control of their water security.  

Excerpt

What stands out in Dholavira, is the attention to detail when it came to collecting and storing water. More than 16 reservoirs are said to exist on this 100 hectare site, of which 5 have been excavated. While these reservoirs harvested rainwater, an elaborate system of drainage channels was planned to ensure that all the runoff collected in these tanks. “See this reservoir,” Raujibhai says, “it has a well inside it so that even if the tank dries up, the well will supply water”. There is also a standalone well and a seasonal stream, which was dammed at multiple points to harvest water.

Their water mantra was simple: collect and store water locally and conserve it to provide fresh water. This continues to be relevant even today for the 1.7 lakh people who live in Rapar, the taluka where Dholavira is located.

Rainfall map of India. Historically, Rapar has received poor rainfall. (Source: IWP)

Rainfall map of India. Historically, Rapar has received poor rainfall. (Source: IWP)

This has been proven by Samerth, an organisation that has worked with communities in 20 Gram Panchayats in Rapar to create structures that can store 64 million cubic feet of water. What are the elements that are common? How is Rapar’s water security now?

 

Read the rest of this amazing story here.

Data, Events, Rain Water, Scrapathon

Scrapathon 1: Rajasthan Rain Water Data

Cross Posted from Rajasthan Rainfall Data (1957 to 2011) by Thejesh GN

The Rajashtan rainfall data was scraped as part of Scrapathon held in Bangalore 21st July 2011. Intially I used scraperwiki, but the huge amount of data made it to timeout all the time 🙂 so I wrote a simple python script to do it.

Data is in the SQLITE file data.sqlite, in a table called rainfall. It has 6,61,459 rows.
Columns: DISTRICT, STATION, YEAR, MONTH, DAY, RAIN_FALL, PAGE_ID

PAGE_ID refers to the ID in the table webpages which lists the webpages from where these data where scraped. It will help you incase you want to cross check. The rest of the columns are self explanatory. I have signed the SQLITE database using my GPG keys and the signatures are inside the file data_gpg_signature.sig

You can download my public key from any keyserver or from biglumber.

You can download here as of now. I will try to make it available on torrent later.