Google Flood Prediction System Is Now Active All Over India And It Uses Pretty Complex AI

New Delhi, 2-Sep-2020

Google has expanded its Flood Forecasting Initiative, which uses Artificial Intelligence to predict when and where flooding will occur, to the whole of India and Bangladesh. Google says it can help protect more than 200 million people in India and around 40 million people in Bangladesh. It has sent around 30 million notifications to people in flood-affected areas so far, and further aims to expand the reach across Bangladesh. The tech giant has partnered with the Bangladesh Water Development Board to provide the services to Bangladesh and collaborated with Yale to visit flood-affected areas and carry out "research to better understand what information people need, how they use it to protect themselves, and what we can do to make that information more accessible," notes Google in a blog post. In the survey, the company found out that 65 per cent of people who receive flood warnings before the flooding begins to evacuate or take actions to protect themselves. Besides expanding its services across India and Bangladesh, Google has also launched a new forecasting model that will enable them to send more accurate results faster. It has revamped the way its alerts look and added support for Hindi, Bengali and 7 other local languages to make it more accessible for everyone."We are providing people with information about flood depth - when and how much floodwaters are likely to rise. And in areas where we can produce depth maps throughout the floodplain, we�re sharing information about depth in the user�s village or area," added Google. Additionally, Google has started a collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to build local networks that can get disaster alert information to people who wouldn�t otherwise receive smartphone alerts directly.