Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the prediction of natural disasters, allowing for the anticipation of fires and floods days in advance. The ability to predict these events represents a significant change in emergency management, which now relies on accurate data, advanced models, and machine learning.
Major tech companies, like Google, along with researchers in Spain, are leading global efforts to predict fires and floods.
The advances are already evident: floods can be anticipated up to 24 hours in advance and fire seasons can be predicted months ahead.
By using machine learning systems, vast amounts of data from satellites, weather stations, and historical records are analyzed to forecast catastrophes.
These global platforms can alert about river floods seven days in advance, positively impacting millions in vulnerable areas.
AI predicts fires
Additionally, innovative tools use artificial intelligence to predict flash floods in cities with a margin of at least 24 hours, thus offering a quick response to these events.
From Google to Spanish universities, AI is becoming a global radar that allows for the prediction of natural disasters, transforming the way risks are managed.
Google has developed Groundsource, a methodology that uses artificial intelligence to convert public information into high-quality structured data, allowing for the prediction of sudden urban floods a day in advance.
This system could also be applied to landslides, heatwaves, and other extreme phenomena.
In Spain, the University of Murcia has created a model based on machine learning to anticipate forest fires, predicting anomalies up to four months in advance with 70% effectiveness in high-risk areas.
This model analyzes climatic variables to determine if a fire season will be more intense than usual.
In a specific case, the system predicted with up to 100% probability a fire anomaly last August, which indeed occurred.
Although the system cannot yet identify exact locations with precision, it manages to detect significant trends, as happened in the northwest of Spain.
According to Miguel Ángel Torres from UAH, predicting a fire does not prevent it, but it allows for mitigating its effects.
Despite these advances, limitations are recognized, such as the lack of resources to scale these systems and the need for greater geographic precision in real-time. However, the trend is clear: AI is destined to become increasingly precise and useful.
In summary, artificial intelligence is establishing itself as a vital tool in the fight against the effects of climate change.
Although technical and implementation challenges persist, its ability to save lives and reduce economic losses is increasingly evident on a global level.
