Flood Detection Added in 18 New Countries
In some of the more utilitarian use cases, Google said new AI advancements will improve its ability to monitor and track flooding and wildfires around the world. The company announced the launch of a new Flood Hub platform which will attempt to analyze large weather data sets to display when and where flooding could occur in 20 counties.
Google started using AI to predict flood patterns back in 2018 in India’s Patna region. Three years later, an expanded version of that program helped send 115 million flood notifications to an estimated 23 million people in India and Bangladesh via Google Search and Maps. At the AI@ event, Google announced it added 18 new countries—mostly located in sub-saharan Africa—to that program this week. If it works as intended, Google said FloodHub could potentially predict flood forecasts in impacted areas up to seven days in advance.
