This project was developed and designed by team “Planet Merra” as a part of the Indo Data Week — Hackathon for Good 2022.

As part of the Climate Data hackathon, Team Planet Merra developed a comprehensive application for detecting and forecasting groundwater. The hackathon’s subject is “Building Climate Resilient Agriculture,” supported by the Government of Telangana and UNDP.

Approximately 12,000 years ago, agriculture caused a paradigm shift in human existence. The advent of land cultivation initiated the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming. Agriculture is a global industry. Out of it, cities and civilizations grew, because crops could now be farmed to meet demand.

Since the dawn of agriculture, water has been a critical component of agricultural production and food security. Over our continuous spread we discovered the scanty natural water bodies are not exactly the solution to the water problem. In order to provide us with the requirement, we scraped the surface of the earth.

Introduction:
Climate change has affected farming in so many ways. Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures eventually reduce yields of desirable crops while encouraging weed and pest proliferation. Changes in precipitation patterns increase the likelihood of short-run crop failures and long-run production declines. Although there will be gains in some crops in some regions of the world, the overall impacts of climate change on agriculture are expected to be negative, threatening global food security.

Using groundwater for agricultural production has the potential to build resilience in food insecure regions of the world. Use of groundwater can boost agricultural production, improve rural incomes and strengthen farmers’ ability to withstand climate shocks and water variability.

So there is a need to identify the groundwater levels. Various surface geophysical techniques are used in groundwater exploration which includes the electrical resistivity method, seismic refractive method, magnetic method, radioactivity method, gravity method, and electromagnetic method.

The resistivity test should be limited to an expansion of subsurface data obtained by borings at structure sites. Its use in tracing aquifers may be adversely affected by the depth to the aquifer and its thickness. Natural ground currents can be so strong as to be very troublesome when using this apparatus.

Seismic refraction methods failed to produce satisfactory results when certain conditions or combinations of conditions existed. The great depths of alluvium created the problem of estimating the seismic traverse length necessary to accurately determine the alluvium-basement interface. These methods are often ineffective and less accurate, that’s why there is a dire need to create a scalable solution to detect groundwater.

Problem:
Existing solutions for detecting groundwater often rely on groundwater exploration done by dowsers, which is an unscientific process of detecting groundwater and hence gives much less accuracy. When farmers dig up their land to create borewells based on observations given by these traditional methods, it often happens that they end up hitting dry wells. Every dry well that is dug up results in substantial losses in terms of money, time, and man hours. Given that a large percentage of the groundwater extracted by India is used for irrigation purposes, no matter how much we talk about Precision Agriculture, Drones, UAVs, etc. in the context of agriculture, the fundamental rule is that “WITHOUT WATER THERE IS NO AGRICULTURE.” Therefore, every drop per crop counts. Groundwater exploitation is a serious problem and needs to be tackled soon, as the groundwater crisis continues to grow and heavily affect farmers.

Challenges:

• Farmers are risk-averse and skeptical towards adopting new technology.
• It is hard to persuade farmers to give up the use of conventional inaccurate techniques for groundwater detection.
• The gravity of scientific methods and their analogy cannot be correlated by farmers, as there is a need for a mediator between a farmer and a scientist or technologist.
• There is an urgent need to deploy a pan-India solution which is both scalable and accurate, capable of catering to the needs of farmers at a holistic and grassroots level with respect to the groundwater crisis.

Objectives of Proposed Solution:

• Detection and effective management of groundwater.
• To plan the location of borewells using spatial data analysis.
• To analyze groundwater trends and help in the recharge of depleting groundwater tables.
• Forecast groundwater trends and enable conservation of groundwater resources.

Solution:
Planet Merra provides precision-driven, AI-enabled, satellite-based hydro analytics for detecting, predicting, and forecasting groundwater resources. We provide groundwater analytics without physically being on-site, which enables us to significantly reduce costs—both economically and logistically—compared to conventional methods, as satellite monitoring of changes in groundwater storage over large areas is a promising supplement to traditional methods.

As part of this hackathon, our team developed a web-based application to help detect groundwater using spatial data. We digitized 209 villages of Goa and used our application to detect groundwater across the entire state. It is an interactive dashboard that shows the presence of groundwater signatures in the selected region.

Team:
Our team consists of Scientists, Engineers, and Big Thinkers passionate about making ideas actionable and accessible. They are trained by ISRO, IIT-Hyderabad, VJTI, and NIT Calicut.

Members:

• Vrunda Maniya — Remote Sensing and GIS Expert
• Divyang Soni — ML Engineer
• Darpan Bagret — Software Engineer
• Vipul Nandedkar — Big Data Specialist
• Dhanya Vangalapudi — Management, R&D