Google launches ‘FloodHub’, a platform to forecast flood: All details inside

The technology giant has also expanded its AI flood forecasting services to 18 counties across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. To recall, these flood forecasting services supported by AI were first introduced in India back in 2018.

Google launched its flood forecasting services to safeguard people against the disasters and natural calamity in 2018.

Google says in a blog post, “We’re also using AI to forecast floods, another extreme weather pattern exacerbated by climate change. We’ve already helped communities to predict when floods will hit and how deep the waters will get — in 2021, we sent 115 million flood alert notifications to 23 million people over Google Search and Maps, helping save countless lives.”

“Today, we’re sharing that we’re now expanding our coverage to more countries in South America (Brazil and Colombia), Sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Angola, South Sudan, Namibia, Liberia, and South Africa), and South Asia (Sri Lanka),” adds Google.

Google states that the company has used an AI technique called transfer learning to make it work in areas where there is less data available. “We’re also announcing the global launch of Google FloodHub, a new platform that displays when and where floods may occur. We’ll also be bringing this information to Google Search and Maps in the future to help more people to reach safety in flooding situations,” stated Google in the blog post.

Meanwhile, the search engine has also integrated its Lens image recognition feature into many of its other features. It includes Google Chrome and Photos. Recently, 9to5Google has pointed out that Google is adding a Lens button to its home page, in its search bar.

After users click on the Lens button, they would be prompted to upload an image or paste a URL to one. Once they do so, they will be taken to a page which might be familiar to them if they have used the Lens app before or any of its other versions.