We have open-sourced our hydrology model to enable National Meteorological and Hydrological Services to integrate advanced AI-based flood forecasting into their own workflows.
Floods are one of the most devastating natural hazards worldwide, often arriving with little warning and leaving long-term damage. Over several years, Google Research has built state-of-the-art AI models for more accurate flood forecasting, ensuring this technology reaches frontline responders to give them time to act. To help further protect vulnerable communities, we are now open-sourcing our hydrology modeling framework on GitHub for others to use and build upon.This open source modeling framework allows researchers and forecasters to train AI flood forecasting models with the same architecture and similar training data to what is used to power riverine flood forecasts on Google’s Flood Hub. It is developed to allow hydrological scientists to build on what we have done at Google Research by adding and testing new models, data, and approaches. It also allows operational forecasters — people whose job entails providing actionable flood warnings for specific areas — to incorporate local data and knowledge into state-of-the-art AI-based flood forecasting.We believe that a scientific breakthrough reaches its full potential when it empowers others to replicate and expand upon findings, ensuring that innovation is a catalyst for worldwide progress. That's why we developed this framework internally and tested it with partners like the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (CHMI). Releasing our model architecture and training pipeline represents a fundamental shift in global flood preparedness, allowing National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs), other meteorological agencies, and authorities to retain full control of their data while empowering local experts to refine models using specialized datasets.
