Artificial intelligence is to help predict flood disasters much more accurately in future. Google has been working on this early warning system since 2017.
Since 2000, the number of global flood disasters has more than doubled, increasing by 134 procent. This results in damage amounting to around 50 billion US dollars every year.
Google now wants to remedy this situation and provide people in these high-risk areas with an improved early warning system. The US company has been working on the project, which aims to use artificial intelligence to predict flood disasters more accurately, since 2017.
How Google wants to use artificial intelligence to predict flood disasters
Around 1.5 billion people worldwide are constantly exposed to the risk of flooding. That’s almost a fifth of the world’s population. For this reason, Google wants to improve early warning systems and “save thousands of lives every year”.
In future, people in risk areas should receive accurate information earlier and therefore in good time. Google’s real-time flood forecasting system enables the company to provide warnings via Google Search, Maps, Android notifications and the Flood Hub.
Using machine learning for flood forecasting
Google has now presented its research progress in the scientific journal Nature. In the article, the search engine giant shows how machine learning technologies can “significantly improve” flood forecasting. Google is particularly interested in countries “where little data on flooding is available”.
With these AI-based technologies, we have increased the reliability of currently available global forecasts from zero to five days on average and improved forecasts for regions in Africa and Asia to be comparable to those currently available in Europe.
Real-time river forecasts are also possible thanks to the technologies used. According to Google, Flood Hub can provide data up to seven days in advance and cover river courses in over 80 countries.
Research into the use of artificial intelligence to predict flood disasters
Google has collaborated with scientists, governments, international organizations and NGOs to research the FloodHub tool. The first pilot early warning system was launched in 2018 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra river basin in India.
Google’s hydrological models can now predict river flooding. To do this, they use publicly available weather data and physical information about catchment areas.
If certain data is missing, artificial intelligence comes into play for predicting flood disasters. Then, with the help of machine learning, Google can “train a single model on all available river data”. In this way, “models can be trained worldwide and predictions can be made for every river location”.
