Transforming Water Resource Management through Flood Forecasting

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Discover how AI is used for flood forecasting and learn about the projects PROWAVE and Google Flood Hub. In this talk, Gregor Johnen from the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management at the University of Duisburg-Essen and FloodWaive Predictive Intelligence GmbH, explains how he uses artificial intelligence in his doctoral dissertation to forecast floods.The language of the presentation is German / Die Vortragssprache ist Deutsch 🇩🇪AbstractHydrology is the science of water, its paths, distributions, and cycles in the environment. It forms the scientific foundation for any sustainable water resource management. In times of climate change and a noticeable increase in extreme weather events, understanding it is vital: It ensures drinking water supply, protects ecosystems, and preserves habitats from disasters. To timely depict the highly complex, dynamic, and nonlinear processes of precipitation, evaporation, and runoff, research is necessarily dependent on modern computer models.For decades, process-based models have set the standard: they are based on physical laws (e.g., conservation of mass and energy) and offer high traceability but encounter limits with gigantic data volumes, long computation times, and complex scaling. In contrast, Machine Learning (ML) approaches process huge data streams in real-time and recognize sometimes hidden relationships of hydrological parameters. Thus, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long established itself as a central key technology for the transformation of the industry.Two notable use cases demonstrate how this looks in practice: The PROWAVE project demonstrates at a regional level how AI-supported predictions optimize the challenging balancing act between effective flood protection and proactive drinking water storage in dams. Meanwhile, the Google Flood Hub illustrates at a global level how AI models enable precise early warnings even in data-poor regions of the world and democratize disaster management. The contribution shows how the shift from purely physical to AI-supported systems significantly shapes the water resource management of the future.By registering for this event, you consent to photo and video recordings taken during the event and their use for GDG communications and promotional purposes. Individual portraits are excluded.