The overarching goal of this web portal will be to establish a comprehensive national Knowledge Base System for Sri Lanka (KBS-Lanka) that encompasses disaster preparedness and rapid response for droughts and other natural disasters, and also enables natural resource assessment and monitoring on a near-real-time basis using remote sensing and other spatial techniques. The KBS-Lanka project has developed a near-real-time (fortnightly and/or monthly) system on the following 3 key components using satellite sensor data from advanced systems that are available free, from reliable sources:

• Baseline conditions (BC-Lanka): Each area will be enriched with numerous baseline datasets (e.g., soil types, land use pattern, drainage, road network, hydro meteorological stations, etc) on the lines of http://www.iwmidsp.org. This data will be invaluable for rapid response and for scientific analysis of a situation or a problem.
• Crop monitoring and Water Productivity patterns (CMS-Lanka): First a baseline data set of cropped areas and crop type will be mapped using high resolution satellite imagery. This will be followed by seasonal and/or annual crop assessments (e.g., % area cultivated relative to average area cultivated over last 5-years; change in crop types, change in crop calendar).
• Drought Monitoring System (DMS-Lanka): This is based on Remote Sensed data from advanced MODIS sensor and historical AVHRR sensor. The final product is a near-real-time online drought monitoring system that will allow drought and extreme wet conditions in different parts of the country to be detected and reported every fortnight. The methodology will be similar to the one used for DMS for South Asia (dms.iwmi.org), but most likely with an advanced on-line interface.