Building a landslide rain check for a friend in Pokhara
What I Built My friend Anuka and her family use a road in Kaski, near Pokhara. In the monsoon the practical question is whether it is worth travelling in the next few days. Because of the monsoon, she couldn't travel to her grandfather's home for a major festival. see the message that she sent me. I built a small tool that reads rainfall forecasts and writes a short message, in English and…
Anuka, her family and a friend developed an app to warn about landslide risks in Kaski, near Pokhara. In monsoon season, the road becomes risky for travel due to heavy rainfall. The app analyzes rainfall forecasts from Open-Meteo and presents a risk percentage, showing whether it's safe to travel for the next three days. It includes a forwardable message in both English and Nepali, fallback chains for communication when phones are down, and a disclaimer about not being an official warning.
The app doesn't consider factors like soil moisture or antecedent rainfall, focusing solely on rain data. The team built the app using TabPFN v2, trained on monsoon seasons from 2015-2021, but decided not to include it due to a one-year artifact in performance. The English language output was generated by Gemma 3 4B, with fixed limits to prevent stilted sentences.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
