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The next chapter in flood resilience: Open sourcing Google’s hydrology framework

Google Research has open-sourced its hydrology modeling framework on GitHub, which includes two versions of the hydrological model: the original version and an upgraded v2 model using ME-LSTM architecture. The upgraded model extends the reliable predictive horizon by six days in gauged basins and one day in ungauged basins compared to the previous version. The framework allows researchers and forecasters to train AI flood forecasting models with the same architecture as Google's Flood Hub.

From the source

This code repository includes two distinct versions of our hydrological model: the original version tested in our benchmarking study published in 2024, and an upgraded model that currently powers real-time global flood forecasting on Flood Hub. The new model builds upon the foundational success of our initial research by transitioning to a new model architecture. This framework allows us to process diverse, multi-source meteorological inputs into a unified flood prediction system, illustrated in the figure below. Our recent benchmarking study shows that this new model extends the reliable predictive horizon by six days in gauged basins and by one day in ungauged basins relative to the previous version.

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