Flood forecasting

Yossi Matias wrote about Google’s progress on flood forecasting in India and Bangladesh for the company’s The Keyword blog. They’re now covering an area of 250,000 square kilometers with a population of 200 million people — a 20x increase from last year — to whom Google has sent 30 million river flood warning notifications in total so far. The technical write-up by Sella Nevo contains details of the AI that went into this, such as a model to infer elevation levels from satellite imagery and a multi-stage model to estimate river profiles. Where AmazonNET helps with climate change prevention, this work sits solidly on the adaptation side.