Print to PDF (landscape, no margins, background graphics on) for the submission deck. Every number is read from the published runs.

AURORA Lifeline

IMD tells you the storm. AURORA tells you which PHC is cut off, how likely, when, and what to move there now.

Cyclone decision support for district control rooms

Track 05 · Build with AI: Code for Communities, Second Edition · aurora-lifeline.web.app

The problem AURORA Lifeline · 2/11

Seventy-two hours out, a control room knows the storm, not which PHC will be cut off.

3.3 lakh

people in Kakinada cut off from every public hospital by landfall (median; P10–P90 1.2 lakh–6.3 lakh)

3

health facilities cut off from referral care by landfall (median)

26 Oct, 23:30 IST

first action deadline, 49 h before landfall: machinery to the bridge near Srinivasa Nagar

Cyclone Montha, as AURORA would have seen it 62 hours before landfall from IMD National Bulletin No. 21. Roads flood, bridges and culverts close, and villages lose their last road to care. Deciding what to move, and where, is still done by phone and experience.

What exists, and the gap AURORA Lifeline · 3/11

Good forecasts and alert channels exist. The asset-level, time-windowed translation does not.

IMD bulletins

Track, intensity, rain by district, surge by coast. The authority, and AURORA's input.

Web-DCRA

District-level composite risk, as documented up to 2023.

INCOIS

Storm-surge and inundation guidance (linked, not ingested).

Sachet (CAP)

The national alert channel. AURORA drafts CAP for the SDMA's originator.

Missing: which facility, which crossing, how likely, in what window, and what to do first.

The solution AURORA Lifeline · 4/11

From one official bulletin to the few decisions that matter.

  1. Step 1

    Read

    Gemini reads the IMD PDF; every value quoted and checked in code

  2. Step 2

    Futures

    1,062 WeatherNext and ECMWF storm futures aligned to IMD's track

  3. Step 3

    Water

    Rain, surge and wind on 5,42,133 road segments, 7,190 bridges

  4. Step 4

    Cut off

    Chance and P10–P90 window for every PHC, hospital, shelter, village

  5. Step 5

    Decide

    Machinery by deadline, triggers, advisories in 3 languages, CAP 1.2

After landfall, field photos are checked by Gemini and routed by fixed rules to the map or an officer. Replays of Montha (Andhra Pradesh) and Dana (Odisha) use only forecasts published before landfall; a season watch reads IMD's archive to show whether IMD is tracking a system today.

In the control room AURORA Lifeline · 5/11

Kakinada: the facilities most at risk, and what to move first

Chance of losing referral access by landfall · likely window if it does

  • PHC Rachapalli36% · 27 Oct, 20:30 IST
  • Government Area Hospital, Tuni34% · 28 Oct, 04:30 IST
  • PHC Panduru30% · 28 Oct, 00:30 IST
  • PHC Kandrakota30% · 27 Oct, 20:30 IST
  • PHC P.Mallapuram27% · 28 Oct, 09:30 IST

Stage an earthmover · deadline (basis: P10 closure − 6 h)

  • bridge near Srinivasa Nagar26 Oct, 23:30 IST
  • bridge near Penumudi (MOOTHA GOPALA KRISHNA VARADHI)27 Oct, 05:30 IST
  • bridge near Nagamalli Thota27 Oct, 00:30 IST

Plus: a map that plays the storm forward, a Bulletin 19 / 21 switch, indicative anticipatory-action triggers, a Telugu advisory read aloud, Ask AURORA, and a field-photo check after landfall.

AI approach AURORA Lifeline · 6/11

Gemini reads, writes and answers. The engine counts. An officer approves.

Reads

Bulletin Reader: the PDF goes to Gemini; code checks basin, speed, category, verbatim quotes and an independent table parser.

Writes

Advisory Writer: placeholders only; code inserts every number and rejects any digit it did not supply, in any script; Telugu and Hindi back-translated and scored.

Answers

Ask AURORA on ADK: five read-only tools; an after-model callback blocks any figure a tool did not return; the facts table if it fails.

Checks

Field Verifier: metadata stripped, Gemini assesses the photo, fixed rules route it; bridge reopenings always go to an officer.

{{fac1_name}} has a {{fac1_p}} chance of losing road access to referral care; stage an earthmover at the {{act1_site}} by {{act1_deadline}}.

Google stack AURORA Lifeline · 7/11

Every Google model here has a job.

Gemini 3.7 Flash

Reads bulletins; drafts advisories; checks field photos

Agent Development Kit

Ask AURORA agent with a number guard

Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite · embedding-2

Back-translation and similarity checks

Cloud TTS Gemini-TTS

Advisories read aloud in Telugu, Hindi and English

Google DeepMind WeatherNext

1,011 of Montha's storm futures

Earth Engine

Sentinel-1 flood mapping for validation

Maps Platform

Vector basemap under deck.gl

Cloud Run · Firebase Hosting

API; static site and tiles on the CDN

Cloud Storage · Firestore · WIF

Gemini cache, daily cap, keyless deploys

Proof, misses included AURORA Lifeline · 8/11

Scored against what actually happened.

Sentinel-1 radar vs forecast road closures

Passes 78 h and 102 h after landfall; 3,65,573 segments observed, 206 with water.

  • AURORA17 hits · FAR 0.998
  • Baseline: lowest ground16 hits · FAR 0.999
  • Baseline: nearest the track0 hits · FAR 1.000

By district: Kakinada 0 of 8 · Konaseema 5 of 7 · West Godavari 3 of 13 · East Godavari 0 of 7 · Eluru 7 of 47 · Krishna district 2 of 124

A weak test: water had largely drained; the false-alarm rate is high.

Bulletin Reader vs hand-checked labels

  • Montha · National Bulletin No. 1948/49 fields
  • Montha · National Bulletin No. 2148/49 fields

IMD's live 2026 bulletin: all applicable checks pass.

Who it serves, and the pilot AURORA Lifeline · 9/11

Built for the people who decide in the 72 hours before landfall.

Collector · DDMA

Where to stage machinery, by when

DM&HO · PHC doctors

Which facilities lose referral access, when

R&B · PR engineers

Which crossings close, for how many people

SDMA originator

A validated CAP 1.2 draft, officer-approved

Pilot: shadow mode with one SDMA and two coastal districts through the October–December season; AURORA runs on each IMD bulletin, officers compare with their own plans, results are scored after each storm. No public alerts; CAP drafts go to the authorised originator for Sachet.

Scale AURORA Lifeline · 10/11

Geography is configuration.

Severe Cyclonic Storm Montha (Oct 2025)

IMD Bulletin No. 21 · 1,062 futures · 6 districts

Kakinada: 3.3 lakh people cut off by landfall (median)

Severe Cyclonic Storm Dana (Oct 2024)

IMD Bulletin No. 1 · 97 futures · 6 districts

Kendrapara: 5.4 lakh people cut off by landfall (median)

  • A new state is a config file and a district list: Odisha's graph, terrain model and storm run took under two minutes of compute.
  • Montha's 1,063 futures ran through 5.4 lakh road segments in 83 seconds on one 7-core machine; the site is static and cached.
  • Static tiles on a CDN; the API on Cloud Run scales to zero, with per-IP limits, a daily model-call cap and cached Gemini outputs, within a US$150 budget. Keyless CI/CD; 115 Python and 7 web tests.
  • Every input except the IMD bulletin is global open data; CAP 1.2 is an international standard.
Roadmap and ask AURORA Lifeline · 11/11

Next: a pilot district, then every cyclone-prone coast.

Roadmap

  • Power-grid exposure and VIIRS outage validation
  • Field reports by WhatsApp and voice note, into the same checks
  • SMS and IVR through Sachet partners
  • Automatic runs on every IMD bulletin in season
  • More states: Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Gujarat

Ask

  • An SDMA partner for a shadow-mode pilot this season
  • Access to official facility and road registries
  • IMD API access for bulletins as they are issued

Not an official warning service; IMD is the authority for cyclone warnings in India. Open source (Apache-2.0): github.com/TusharTechs/aurora-lifeline