Last year, the US hurricane season produced a record-breaking 30 named storms. A typical year produces 12 named storms.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has predicted another above-normal Atlantic hurricane season this year forecasting a 60% chance of an above-normal season, a 30% chance of a near-normal season, and a 10% chance of a below-normal season.
For 2021, a likely range of 13 to 20 named storms is predicted, of which 6 to 10 could become hurricanes.
We know that as our climate changes, major weather events and natural disasters will increase. We also know that our global population is expanding and habitation is spreading into areas that were once sparsely or even unpopulated. It’s not unreasonable to assume that this combination means more people in more places will be impacted by natural disasters in the future.
Flooding is one of the most costly natural disasters. In the United States alone, Congress budgets $54 billion annually for hurricane and flood damage. Four out of the ten costliest hurricanes in the US have occurred in the last decade.
With hurricanes and tropical storms often comes catastrophic flooding. We’ve seen this before with Hurricane Harvey (Houston, 2017 pictured above), Hurricane Florence (North and South Carolina, 2018) and Hurricane Laura (Louisiana, 2020).
Flooding results in loss of life, safety risks and damage to public and private assets and infrastructure. And while most people understand the seriousness of flooding, understanding flood forecasting and modelling is still out of reach.
Even emergency managers struggle to provide accurate, high-resolution, real-time flood mapping, as hydraulic 2D flood modelling traditionally takes hours or even days to compute.
FloodMapp is changing this with our groundbreaking rapid flood model technology called DASH. Powered by artificial intelligence, DASH uses machine learning, hydraulics and hydrology algorithms to forecast and map flooding in real time.
DASH ingests real-time and forecast rainfall data, coastal and real-time river height data through large scale cloud-based data pipeline infrastructure to rapidly predict peak river heights, and generate inundation mapping at scale over large areas.
Essentially, DASH does all the hard work, at superhuman speeds, to provide businesses and emergency responders with access to high-resolution, real-time flood mapping via a live feed.
We are excited to announce that FloodMapp NowCast, powered by DASH, is available through Catalyst’s Iluminr platform. Emergency responders will have a greater situational awareness allowing them to take practical steps to safely coordinate evacuations and prevent asset losses and damage.
FloodMapp is already being used by the Queensland Government in Australia as well as the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in the USA. This hurricane season, we will be watching closely and using data captured to inform the DASH model further.
Juliette will be speaking with Marcus Vaughan, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Catalyst, at the Threat Intelligence Masterclass on 16 June 5pm EDT / 17 June 7am AEST.
Book your place here.