The catastrophe that has caused in the last 24 hours the floods caused by the DANA that is hitting the peninsula, with 95 deaths and dozens missing, highlights the importance of research tools meteorological and has brought back to the present one launched by Google in 2021. Flood Hub or Flood Center is a development of Google Research which is presented in the format of interactive map to predict river floods an average of five days in advance and in more than 80 countries, including Spain.
Flood Hub is powered by artificial intelligence and uses public and open data setsfrom the predictions of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to the forecasts generated by GraphCast from Google’s AI division DeepMind and the Sentinel-1 satellites of the European Space Agency’s Copernicus programamong other sources that also include historical and local data.
Last March, an article published in Nature by the vice president of Engineering and Research, Yossi Matiasand the scientific researcher Gray Nearingboth from the Google Research division, evaluated the usefulness of this technology and concluded that using AI and open data sets it is possible to significantly improve the prediction of floods or extreme river events in the short term.
After working with researchers from JKU Institute of Machine Learning Austrian and Yale UniversityGoogle Research determined that it was possible to train a single AI model with all available river data and apply it to watersheds for which no data is known. Thus‘models can be trained globally and can make predictions for any location’they pointed out in Nature.
Using the Google Flood Center is as simple as any similar application. Google Maps. Accessing the interactive map, you must grant the browser permission to detect the location. It is also possible not to do so and enter the desired location in the search bar or simply move with the mouse and zoom as desired.
However, for some reason the tool does not show information, at the time of writing, about the areas most affected by DANA in Valencia. Yes it does in the rest of the peninsula.
on the menu Legend different are available hazard level indicators -Normal, Warnings, Danger, Extreme- and that there is no data in a certain location.
By clicking on any of the locations marked on the map, a side column opens in which it is indicated when the flow of a river is expected to decrease or increase and a graph with the level at which it is, with a history of the previous days and a forecast for the following ones.
In this forecast, we distinguish three levels: the current one of the river, one of warning and another of danger. The one of warning represents the severity of flooding that is expected at the location once every 2 years, the ‘danger level’ represents the severity of flooding that is expected once every 5 years, and the ‘extreme level’ represents the severity of flooding that is expected once every 20 years.
Flood Hub also has an expert mode, which is accessed by clicking the icon More optionsnext to the search box, and then in Flood Hub for experts. After activating it, it shows additional information such as the size of the selected basin in m², the flow in m³/s that corresponds to each of the levels in this case and the source of the information, among other useful data.