Overview
- Groundsource converts roughly 5 million news articles into a geolocated record of about 2.6 million flood events spanning more than 150 countries.
- A Long Short-Term Memory model uses hourly weather forecasts and local factors to predict medium or high flash-flood risk for the next 24 hours.
- Urban flash-flood forecasts are now live on Google’s Flood Hub across 150+ countries and are being shared with emergency-response partners.
- Early trials reported practical benefits, including a Southern African authority confirming an alert and accelerating on-the-ground response.
- Key limitations include coarse ~20 km resolution, no local radar input, no severity estimates, and potential performance gaps where news coverage is sparse.