
GAIA FLOOD AI MAPPING AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Floods are the most common peril to impact communities worldwide, often resulting in huge financial losses and human fatalities. With the emergence of Big Data and increased computing power, experts now have access to tools that evaluate flood hazard at unprecedented accuracy. Communicating their findings to provide actionable insight, however, has remained a key challenge in disaster risk reduction for governments, insurers, and financial institutions.
Simply put, GAIA Flood helps users identify assets at risk of flooding before they occur; it is an AI-assisted application that reasons with complex geospatial data, allowing users to visualize susceptibility, hazard, vulnerability, and risk to flooding at a high resolution over large areas. Our cognitive AI system mimics human-expert reasoning, and provides explainable assessments in natural language, making it easy to interpret the results.
North Vancouver Flood Hazard,
Vulnerability and Risk Map (beta)
British Columbia, Canada
The Challenge
North Vancouver, British Columbia is an urban centre located on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. With an average annual precipitation of almost 1.5 meters, the area is prone to periods of heavy rain, which can lead to flooding. Because of the complex topography in the area, assets are exposed to a wide range of flood-risk levels, depending on upstream and downstream terrain characteristics, as well as their intrinsic vulnerabilities.
The Solution
Mimicking the traditional process that professional engineers and hydrologists use to evaluate flood risk, our method provides a relative risk score for each individual asset. The result is a web map tool that delivers a new means of communicating susceptibility, hazard, vulnerability and risk information – with transparency, and in natural language. By looking at key characteristics of each asset, the tool can also be used to assess the performance of numerical flood hazard models.