It's always so much fun for kids to play outside in the rain. For this young bunch of amateur meteorologists, measuring these showers and assessing its impact on the local environment offers even more excitement.
As the world celebrated World Water Day on Tuesday, a group of students from St. Joseph's Upper Primary School in Malayinchippara brought out a book on the local rainfall database of the Meenachil river basin. Eminent conservationist Madhav Gadgil released the book at an online function held here.
The book primarily focusses on the size, intensity, duration and patterns of precipitation in the region over the past 250 days. Its details generally correlate with official measurements, while also helping one to understand the very localised nature of rainfall.
In his preface to the book, Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said the initiative had taken the school closer towards being climate-equipped. “The school now monitors rainfall using rain gauges on a daily basis. This exercise helps the students and the community make sense of the rainfall and weather changes around. After proper validation, the rainfall data collected can be used to study the local weather changes,” noted Mr. Koll.
As part of the initiative, Mr. Koll had also conducted training sessions for the kids in rain-gauging and related activities.
These kids, members of the school's climate Action Group, are also assisting the Meenachil River Rain Monitoring Network run by the Meenachil River Protection Council (MRPC), a conservationist collective.
Commenting on the initiative, Aby Immanuel, secretary, MRPC, said plans were also afoot to install a water flow monitoring scale and a thermometer on the school premises to measure the temperature. “The objective is to convert the school as a reference centre to help analyse the local climatic variations,” he said.
