Google's AI-enabled Flood Forecasting Goes Global

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being tapped to address the impacts of climate change. From a report: Google's latest announcement is one example. Countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America can now use its AI-enabled platform that displays flood forecasts. Starting Monday, governments, aid organizations and people in 60 countries across these regions are able to access Google's flood prediction information up to seven days in advance of an incoming flood.

Initially launched in 2021, Flood Hub displays forecasts for riverine floods -- or floods that take place when streams or rivers overflow their banks and into surrounding areas -- showing when and where they are likely to occur. Human-caused climate change can cause these kinds of floods to become larger or more frequent than they used to be, per the EPA. Regions with high percentages of population vulnerable to flood risk -- like the Netherlands, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as well as Myanmar, which was just struck by Cyclone Mocha -- are now on Google's list of forecastable places. It can also be used in parts of the Central American "dry corridor" in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala -- where climate change and conflict collide.

AI-enabled?

[madsh]

I don’t know what that means. Google has a lot of data that can help forecast where water runs and collects - but I don’t think an AI based weather forecast outperforms current models (yet).

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[madsh]

And using historical data to train a prediction algorithm in a changing environment?!? Not really sure what kind of learning feedback makes sense.

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[gweihir]

Indeed. Currently everything about the weather is changing and we are approaching a state where drastic changes become more and more likely.

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[dddux]

I'm living in Croatia and I lived in Taiwan for a while. The weather patterns since mid 2010s seem more and more close to weather in Taiwan, with rainy seasons and drastic temperature changes during those. The "rainy season" lasts several weeks and then we get summer or winter. That's when floods usually happen, so I don't see why we need AI to predict that. Admittedly, it can happen at other times, too... but if it rains for a couple of days you know floods will happen.

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[dbialac]

IBM's takeover of TWC has resulted in weather information that can't even provide the correct current conditions. I wake up to temperatures that are almost never right and computer generated "current conditions" that are almost never right. I have to look at the last actual radar map to get the actual rain/snow map. The forecasts used to be dead on 2 weeks out.

So it will misspredict floods as draughts?

[gweihir]

At least now and then and people are going to drown? That sounds really bad. Well, it is Google so at least there is really a lot of money to sue them for.

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[dbialac]

If we were alive 11,000 years ago, how much would we be panicking about the glaciers melting and sea levels rising? We're for certain making what's going on worse, but the fact is the earth and its climate are not static.

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[madsh]

Well at that time all 5 million of us, did not know about better places to live and got access to internet and jet planes.

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[dbialac]

The point is to imagine that you were with what you know today and have today. Our time is arbitrary and the events that we're seeing are to a degree arbitrary. Glaciers would be melting and sea levels would be rising without us, just at a slower rate.

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[gweihir]

It matters very much at which speed things happen.

1. 100 years? May be an extinction-level even for us and will be for a lot of the biosphere. At the very least partial civilization collapse.
2. 10'000 years? Plants, animals and humans can adapt and slowly migrate.
3. 1'000'000 years? Nobody even notices much.