When it floods, it floods

Get wet

🧠 Half Baked

Half Baked is my weekly, shall we say, informal thoughts, questions, research, and INI-specific tools, as I'm living/struggling with them. The info below is intended only for INI members.

In a present and future where water is 1) much more scarce and 2) everywhere all at once, re-thinking how we think about it is an essential exercise, from urban planning to insurance.

Google is hoping they’ve come a long way from Google Flu to better predict floods in 80 countries and counting (Google blog post, Nature paper (quoted below)).

“Here we show that artificial intelligence-based forecasting achieves reliability in predicting extreme riverine events in ungauged watersheds at up to a five-day lead time that is similar to or better than the reliability of nowcasts (zero-day lead time) from a current state-of-the-art global modelling system (the Copernicus Emergency Management Service Global Flood Awareness System).

In addition, we achieve accuracies over five-year return period events that are similar to or better than current accuracies over one-year return period events.

This means that artificial intelligence can provide flood warnings earlier and over larger and more impactful events in ungauged basins.“

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— Quinn

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