Thejesh GN

I was going through weather data exposed by India Water Portal and I was thinking about an interesting application which would show my love to Bangalore. The best part of Bangalore is its temperature, rains and clouds. So I wrote this small app which uses the data provided by India Water Portal (which in turn is by CRU). IWP has data for all the districts in India, for every month and for multiple parameters. They have data for 100 years. It quite an amount of data to play with if you are interested. They have an easy way of filtering and downloading.

Flood forecast alerts are provided by Central Water Commission. They have boring maps and tables. Also they don’t provide data in program accessible format. Members of ICTD for asia are working on parsing and storing that data. In the meantime I wanted something to play. I found ScraperWiki (hacker news discussion) which can be used to scrape data from any page and schedule it for running. It allows php, python and ruby languages. Its easy and gives lot more flexibility than Y! pipes to scrape that data. Here is my scraper to get the flood data. You will have to register to get an API to use the data. Data is available in JSON, XML, PHP etc.

After watching “developing world” video on TED, I was eager to try out Google visualization API. When I found the rain fall information, I thought its the best suited data to play around. Go check out the Visualization of Rain Fall in Karnataka.