Google built a flash-flood prediction tool using Gemini and old news reports

Flash floods are notoriously difficult to predict, but Google might have a novel solution. The company just revealed Groundsource, a prediction tool for flash floods that uses Gemini to source data from old news reports. This is the first time it has used a language model for this type of work.

Google tasked Gemini with sorting through 5 million news articles from around the world and isolating flood reports. It transformed this data into a geo-tagged series of chronological events. Next, researchers trained a model to ingest current weather forecasts and leverage the Groundsource data to determine the likelihood of a flash flood in a given area.

We don't have any concrete information as to how accurate Google's forecast model is, though that should come over time. One trial user did say it helped his organization respond quicker to localized weather events. For now, the company is ...