{"id":335686,"date":"2026-03-12T16:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T16:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/335686\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T16:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T16:37:09","slug":"boosting-disaster-resilience-with-googles-groundsource","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/335686\/","title":{"rendered":"Boosting disaster resilience with Google&#8217;s Groundsource"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-block-key=\"eg93e\">When disaster strikes, information is a lifeline. For years, as part of Google\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/research.google\/blog\/how-ai-is-helping-us-build-a-more-resilient-planet\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Crisis Resilience efforts,<\/a> we\u2019ve 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 \u2014 until now.<\/p>\n<p data-block-key=\"dcdq4\">Today, we\u2019re introducing Groundsource, a new AI-powered methodology that transforms public information into a high-quality record of historical disaster data \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p data-block-key=\"e5lmf\">The urban flash floods forecasts are available in Google\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.research.google\/floods\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Flood Hub<\/a> \u2014 along with our existing <a href=\"https:\/\/research.google\/blog\/using-ai-to-expand-global-access-to-reliable-flood-forecasts\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">riverine flood forecasts<\/a> which cover 2 billion people in more than 150 countries for the most significant riverine floods \u2014 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 \u2014 particularly in urban regions that have lacked historical flash flooding data.<\/p>\n<p data-block-key=\"fg9dp\">Today, the Urban Flash Floods model and dataset join our <a href=\"http:\/\/ai.google\/earth-ai\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Google Earth AI<\/a> 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&#8217;t just analyzing the past \u2014 we\u2019re building a more resilient future for everyone towards our goal that no one is surprised by a natural disaster.<\/p>\n<p data-block-key=\"46lt3\">Learn more about our research to close the data gap with <a href=\"https:\/\/research.google\/blog\/introducing-groundsource-turning-news-reports-into-data-with-gemini\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Groundsource<\/a> and expand our flood forecasting to <a href=\"https:\/\/research.google\/blog\/protecting-cities-with-ai-driven-flash-flood-forecasting\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">urban flash floods<\/a> to help keep communities safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When disaster strikes, information is a lifeline. For years, as part of Google\u2019s Crisis Resilience efforts, we\u2019ve provided&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,11003,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-335686","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-none","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}