Groundsource: using AI to help communities better predict natural disasters

When disaster strikes, information is a lifeline. For years, as part of Google’s Crisis Resilience efforts, we’ve provided early warnings about natural hazards to help communities stay safe. However, high-fidelity data for certain disasters like flash floods simply did not exist. This data gap has long prevented our ability to train AI models to predict flash floods before they happen — until now.

Today, we’re introducing Groundsource, a new AI-powered methodology that transforms public information into a high-quality record of historical disaster data — starting with flash floods in urban areas. Groundsource used Gemini to analyze decades of public reports and identified over 2.6 million historical flood events spanning more than 150 countries. It then used Google Maps to determine precise geographic boundaries for each event to create a dataset focused on flash floods. Using this dataset we trained a new model that makes tangible progress towards predicting flash floods in urban areas up to 24 hours in advance.

The urban flash floods forecasts are available in Google’s Flood Hub — along with our existing riverine flood forecasts which cover 2 billion people in more than 150 countries for the most significant riverine floods — marking a significant expansion to our flood forecasting capabilities. For communities around the world, this means better preparedness before a disaster strikes. For our partners and scientists, Groundsource provides a massive, open-source benchmark to scale their impact — particularly in urban regions that have lacked historical flash flooding data.

Today, the Urban Flash Floods model and dataset join our Google Earth AI family of geospatial models and datasets. Importantly, the same AI-driven approach of Groundsource has the potential to be applied to other natural disasters, like landslides or heat waves, turning verified reports from around the world into datasets that enable improved global resilience. By turning public information into actionable data, we aren't just analyzing the past — we’re building a more resilient future for everyone towards our goal that no one is surprised by a natural disaster.

Learn more about our research to close the data gap with Groundsource and expand our flood forecasting to urban flash floods to help keep communities safe.