Annual Summary Report 2017 – 2018

Highlights 

During this period, we

• Set up instrumentation on weather monitoring in Thinadhdhoo Island and fixed the station in Maathoda in Maldives where the console was having errors and made arrangements to obtain additional data in Maldives.
• Obtained hazards and climate data, setting up instrumentation on soil moisture, air pollution and weather stations in two locations in Sri Lanka – one on a coastal location in Kalpitiya Peninsula in Puttalam, and another on top of a hill station in Kandy.
• Participated in drawing up policy on climate change research and environmental pollution for the private sector initiative in Sri Lanka.
• Previously installed instrumentation were maintained, and quality control of data was undertaken.
• We helped Maldivian partners develop a pre-proposal on coral bleaching for PEER Cycle 8. We supported their full proposal development which fell short. We helped Sri Lanka partners with a successful proposal on manmade disasters to Open Society Foundation.
• We continued to support decision making by water and environmental and natural resource managers through providing a weekly and monthly climate reports for Sri Lanka and Maldives.
• We launched Drought Portals for the Maldives and Sri Lanka. These portals are a comprehensive resource on drought for either country which is useful for school children, undergraduates, resource managers, policymakers, and the educated public.
• We provided climate analysis for disaster experts.

Content 

• Disaster Case Studies

• Data Collection

• Proposal Development

• Instrumentation

• Air Pollution

• Supplementary Project

Disaster Case Studies 

• Research on flood events in Akurana, Kandy, Ratnapura and in Puttalam District was carried out. 
• Landslides in Aranayaka was analyzed to model climate variables. 

These case studies were reported at an International Scientific Conference in Sri Lanka.

Data Collection 

We collected data (weather, wind and air quality) in Maldives (Male, Maathoda) and Sri Lanka (Norachcholai, Kalpitiya, Nawalapitiya, and Kandy). Data on rain water harvest storage tanks in Maldives Islands were obtained. 

Simultaneously Digitization, Quality control, and documentation were undertaken, and we are also entering the data into the IRI Data Library.

Proposal Development

Supplementary proposal titled “STEM Education and Capacity Building for Resources and Risk Management in Remote Outposts capitalizing on PEER projects on water, drought and hazards: Gaafu Dhaalu Atoll in Southern Maldives in collaboration with Small Island research Centre, GDh Atoll, Maldives was submitted.

We supported the development of the PEER cycle 8 proposal entitled ‘Coral Bleaching Studies in the Maldives: Towards developing Environmental and Economic Resiliency for Atoll Ecosystems’ led by our Maldivian partners. The pre-proposal was successful, but the full proposal was not awarded. Regardless, we hope to support research work on this area. 

We have also developed a small grant proposal to document the Kandy Mob Violence Disaster with a view to developing work on man-made disasters and its predictions and submitted it to the Open Society Foundation which has since been awarded.

Instrumentation 

Purchased weather stations and other instruments. 

We also hope to better mitigate the problems that arose in network connections of the existing instruments and problems we faced during data extraction from these instruments.

We managed the collected data and setting up a regular protocol to collect the data from the instruments already installed will be standardized. This helped us identify, fill in the lost or missing data, fix the damaged or erroneous data and better data quality control was achieved.

We will continue to work on assessing vulnerability and resilience to different disasters, hazard impact analysis and writing up Research on Selected Disasters to be taken forward.

Air Pollution

We undertook further research; air pollution analysis in two selected regions in Sri Lanka, the Western shore of the Puttalam District (Kalpitiya) and in the Western Highlands of the Kandy district (Nawalapitiya, Akurana) was undertaken. Data collection was undertaken for both areas from our own weather instruments which we set up and data from selected government institutions. Our work shall compare Air Quality and wind data in Colombo, Nawalapitiya and Norochcholai to track the long-range transport of coal dust from the Norochcholai coal power plant to the Highlands of Sri Lanka and to the densely populated Western Province.

Supplementary Project

We have also continued work in the supplementary proposal for STEM education in the Maldives by the Maldivian partners – Small Island Research Group/Centre. For this, we have contributed to

• Drawing up the work plan for the project to account for revised budget
• Purchase of equipment for the project for water quality testing, weather station, microscopes and ancillaries
• Meeting with the project partners and remote communication
• Visit to Male Offices of the Small Island Research Group/Centre to discuss project with Aishath Abdulla and Hussein Zahir of the Small Island Research Group.
• Visit to Maldives National University in Male to discuss ongoing work on air quality and to make arrangements for STEM work.
• Visit to MNU in Thinadhdhoo island of Huvadhoo Atoll for collaboration on STEM project. They arranged our engagement with the Atoll School.
• Visit to Maathoda office off the Small Island Research Centre/Group to undertake arrangements for the STEM project, to check on weather station, make arrangements for handover and installation of microscope and water quality instruments. Here the co-PI, Zubair was able to meet with the PI M. Aslam and have substantial planning discussions and also handover equipment.
• Meeting with Principal of Huvadhoo School to arrange for STEM project work. As follow up permission are being sought from the Zonal Education Director.
• Handing over scientific equipment for the middle school students of the G. Dh. Atoll Education Centre Thinadhdhoo, Small Island Research Centre who will be a part of this project. 
• We are undertaking discussions on how to manage the supplementary project with our partners.

We have visited the Maldives and met with project partners and had meetings. The main purpose of the visit was to collect data from the Maldives National University (MNU), Maldives Meteorological Service (MMS) and LaMER and to discuss the work the project and with Small Island Research Group and Maldives FECT.