What's Our Weather ?

Crowdsourced platform for rain, hail and other weather data and be a hobbyist!

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Inspiration

In 2018 and 2019, our state of Kerala was devastated by unexpected floods. Our state experienced the extreme consequence of climate change. In a span of 3 days (August 14 - 16) in 2018, more than 200mm of rain fell, the largest in over 100 years. Our small state has 44 rivers, and the rainfall caused all the rivers to overflow. The flood-affected millions of people and had to be rehabilitated. A similar flood also repeated in 2019, though not as extreme as the 2018's.

We understood the importance of open data at the time. OpenStreetMap was used to make flood maps, and tools for disaster relief. What we don't have reliable is open data for rainfall, river monitoring, etc.

With this project, we aim to deploy this system to track rainfall, air quality, weather parameters, etc.

What it does

A social platform for anyone to start a hobby of weather data collection. Currently, the platform provides information to set up rain gauge on your own and take measurements. Each day, there's a time slot to submit data. We're gamifying the data collection, awarding badges for longest streak, etc. like StackOverflow reputation.

We're also working on a river water level monitoring IoT device to set up on riverbanks. This device will send water levels daily, which can be mapped and analyzed.

The data collected through this platform will be made open for anyone to use. This will also be useful for ML, Data related projects, which in turn helps in prediction and other utilities.

How we built it

  • Node Express.js
  • VueJS
  • MongoDB Atlas - Stores all the data
  • Radar.io API for geolocation related functions

Challenges we ran into

  • Working with NodeJS and express.js for the first time, the challenge in picking it up
  • Plotting the data onto the map from Mongo to leaflet
  • Connecting frontend to the backend with different people working on both

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We all wanted to learn something new by participating in this hackathon, and we learned a lot from it. It was our first time working with node and Vue.
  • We successfully completed the MVP in two days

What we learned

  • Basics of NodeJS and express.js, making APIs with it
  • VueJS & Buefy
  • Mongo DB
  • Measuring and collecting rain data

What's next for What's Our Weather?

The rain season begins on June 1, and we hope to deploy this project and start this hobby ourselves. Adding more features one after the other, we hope to add more users to this platform and start a good hobby.

  • Optimizing the platform
  • Creating a prediction model from the rain data along with other data
  • Approaching the government for their support
  • Building a community of volunteers
  • Rain data analytics platform
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