IWMI in association with the Department of Irrigation in Sri Lanka, organized a workshop on May 3, 2016 at IWMI headquarters, to bring a community of professionals who have been using mobile weather stations for managing natural disasters. The workshop was organized as part of a project funded by the Global Facility of Disaster Risk Reduction (GFDRR) titled ‘Open-source mobile weather stations: reducing flood damages and increasing the preparedness of communities’ in Sri Lanka.
At the request of the Irrigation Department in Anuradhapura, IWMI has installed mobile weather stations in the upper catchment of the Nachchaduwa reservoir, to provide information about rainfall intensity in real-time to the managers of the reservoir (Read more in the previous post).
The objective of the workshop was to provide a description of the mobile weather stations that are being piloted by IWMI, and to learn from the experiences of other organizations that have been using similar technologies for managing natural disasters. Representatives from different organizations and government departments made presentations, followed by a discussion on the opportunities for and constraints in using weather stations.
IWMI’s David Weiberg presented on ‘Open-Source Mobile Weather Stations: Providing Information for a More Secure Water Future‘ and Soumya Balasubramanya made a presentation on ‘Management requires measurement: Reducing flood damage by improving response time’.