Protecting cities with AI-driven flash flood forecasting
Google Research 4 months ago
Google announced Urban Flash Flood forecasts on Flood Hub using AI to predict flash flood risk in urban areas up to 24 hours in advance. The model was trained on a dataset of historical flood events extracted from news reports using Gemini and operates at 20x20 kilometer spatial resolution using global weather data from NASA, NOAA, and DeepMind. The system achieves recall and precision performance equivalent to the US National Weather Service in many flood-affected countries in the Global South, addressing a critical gap in early warning systems where less than half of developing countries have access to multi-hazard forecasting.