Obtaining Rainfall Data From KSNDMC

To obtain the rainfall dataset you want -

1. Send in an email to office@ksndmc.org addressing the director
2. In the email, make sure you mention who you are, what data you want, what you intend to do with the data, and whether the purpose is commercial
3. Call the toll free number +91 080 67355000 if you don’t get an email reply within 3-4 working days. (Note - Do not call on Sundays as the office is closed and call between 10AM-6PM)
4. On approval from the director, the data would be sent to you in a raw excel sheet format

The datasets I got for my project are -

• Daily rainfall data for 184 rain gauges situated across the Bengaluru Urban district
• A shapefile containing all rain gauge locations
• Rainfall data, for the last 30 years, across the 4 taluks (Anekal, North, South, East) in the Bengaluru Urban district

*I decided not to use the third dataset for this task

Data Cleansing -

• A major problem was the lack of coherence between the hobli names in the shapefile and the hobli names in the excel sheet mostly in terms of spelling and format differences (capitalisation, underscores, etc)
• This meant that I could not join my required field (in this case, annual rainfall for each rain gauge) to the shapefile directly without making all the record names match - a task which I performed manually across all 184 rain gauges

*PM contact@biome-solutions.com for more information on the cleansed dataset

- Vikhyath Mondreti, Summer Intern at Biome Environmental Solutions