Floods and floods, Google alerts also available in Italy
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Google has decided to expand the operation of its Flood Hub to a total of 80 countries around the world watercourse monitoring platform and flooding (in English, flood means full of the river) that could cause due to floods or intense rainfall.
The new ones Added countries are 60, in Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific and South and Central America; there is also much of Italyand now the alert system can help about 460 million people around the world.
History
The Italian Institute of Technology and the future Bang between AI, robotics and nanomaterials
by Emanuele Capone, by Emanuele Capone
AI, maps and forecasts: how Flood Hub works
As we already reported on Italian Tech a couple of years agoFlood Hub has been active now since 2018 and is one of many examples of useful use of artificial intelligence set up by the Mountain View company.
As explained, the AI that underpins the platform uses various data sourcesall publicly available (such as weather forecasts and satellite images), to make estimates of what could happen in the event of prolonged rains and then create two forecast models: a hydrological model (predicts the amount of water flowing in a river) and a flood model (predicts which areas will be affected, how far and how deep the water will be).
In these 5 years, the model has evidently improved, so much so that a further novelty is the fact that the estimates now make it possible to trigger a possible alert up to 7 days before the eventwhile until last year it was not possible to get information more than 48 hours in advance.
The example of Emilia: how to use Flood Hub
Using the platform is very simple: you reach the main page and you have a world map in front of you which looks like that of Google Maps, but divided into many small hexagons.
Everything also works from a smartphone: you can zoom in, with your fingers or the mouse, until you reach the desired area, click on the placeholder and see the latest information available and forecasts for the next 7 days. At the time of writing, by clicking (for example) on Saint Mary Magdalene, it can be seen that no changes are foreseen for the Po river at that point and that the alert and danger levels are far away; differently, for San Colombano al Lambro it can be seen that the Po is expected to rise and that the highest level should be reached on 26 May.
It doesn’t seem to be active, at least for our country and at least for the moment, the alert function with notifications (on the smartphone) present in other areas of the world, but it is clearly possible to go back to consulting the Flood Hub page every time you need to move and want to know better what you will encounter.
Something similar can also be done on Google Maps, because the popular Big G cartographic app allows you to find information on atmospheric events as if it were a normal search engine: in the case of Italy, if you type “allagamenti emilia” you are redirected at the map Floods, North East Italy (image above) and in fact you can view a map of the situation. Which is updated in real time and allows you to easily understand if the area you have to cross presents any danger, if there are closed roads and which ones.
@capoema
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