Project SHAMROCC in Kalimpong (29Feb-04Mar2016) - an event of note.

Prof David Petley has covered the technical aspects of the landslides in a series of articles posted day wise on his blog here.

About Project SHAMROCC (Sensing with High Accuracy in Mountainous Regions for Observations of Climate Change) involves participation of experts in various disciplines from the UK and India for the development of a Landslide Prediction System in the form of low-cost high density sensor networks and computer systems to be installed in specific landslide prone zones of Kalimpong.

Kalimpong was selected from among a number of areas for installation of the prototype equipment on the basis of historical landslides that have claimed lives/damaged infrastructure as well as on the availability of broad band internet in the close vicinity. 

SaveTheHills (STH), a Kalimpong-based NGO which has been working on landslide hazards for the past 8yrs actively collaborated with the project in this regard.

Further, the team installed two internet based automatic weather stations in Kalimpong which will provide real time weather data to SHAMROCC scientists both in the UK and India in order to observe, firsthand the effects of climate change and shifting rainfall patterns in the Darjeeling Himalayas. This AWS data on Kalimpong  is available here and is updated every 60secs.

It is hoped that the study will make landslide prediction feasible and accurate and the lessons learnt from this project can be applied to other regions including the UK as well.
Project SHAMROCC comes under the aegis of UKIERI (UK-India Education and Research Initiative) and is funded by the British Council.

My grateful thanks to the entire SHAMROCC team for their visit and the time that they spent in Kalimpong. It was wonderful.

Praful Rao,
Kalimpong,
Dist Darjeeling