Offering designed to improve relief and
recovery efforts across the continental United States
BROOKLYN, N.Y., July 15,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Floodbase announced today the
launch of a rapid flood response data product covering flood events
in the continental U.S. The service will provide a near-real time
flood hazard layer to government agencies and corporations who
conduct damage assessments or visualize impacts to critical assets
or populations. This data will enable enhanced rapid response and
recovery operations, and improve the insurance claims estimation
processes.
Flooding is the most common and costly weather-related
disaster in the United States. A
recent Senate report estimated that flooding costs the U.S. between
$180 and $496
billion each year.
In 2023 Floodbase was selected through the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate's
(S&T) Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) to strengthen
the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) flood analytics
capabilities. The company will now make these capabilities
available to customers by providing access to critical flood event
analytics that capture hourly and peak flood extent by leveraging
machine learning to fuse data from public satellites, stream
gauges, and hydrological models.
The result is a continuous map of flood severity, allowing
Floodbase to capture peak flooding at the county and census tract
level. Users can then display the dataset over existing GIS map
data layers such as infrastructure, policyholders, or a social
vulnerability index, thereby making relief and recovery efforts
more efficient.
Beginning on August 1st, this
near-real time flood data will be available to government and
commercial customers such as state and local emergency management
agencies, insurance data platforms, nonprofits, and large
corporations with national emergency operations centers. Interested
parties can now register for the flood data response product
waitlist at floodbase.com/flood-response.
Floodbase will make the data it produces for federal agencies
such as FEMA available for purchase to commercial and governmental
customers through the end of the North Atlantic hurricane season
(November 30th) each time that the
federal government submits a data request within the continental
U.S. to Floodbase.
The data can be used to analyze flooding caused by major,
predicted events such as Hurricane Harvey. It is particularly
useful for unexpected pluvial and fluvial flood events such as the
recent floods in Iowa, during
which 11 inches of rain fell on
Rock Rapids in just a few hours,
causing rivers to overflow their banks.
"Our mission is to enable all communities to prepare for and
respond to climate disasters by reducing the barriers to scientific
information and capital," said Bessie
Schwarz, Floodbase CEO. "By making this data more broadly
available, communities will be better prepared, and better equipped
to deploy resources to recover efficiently, and equitably from
flood events."
In order to support rapid relief and recovery efforts, Floodbase
will send daily spatial data updates on the location, extent, and
severity of select floods, which can cover municipalities,
counties, states, or regions depending on the size of the event and
scope of the initial request from the federal government. Once
the flood recedes, Floodbase will deliver daily flood extent data
for the duration of the flood event - including the point of
maximum flooding within the area of interest.
"Regardless of the flood event type, we will begin delivering
data to customers within 1-2 days of the federal request being
initiated with Floodbase. This will enable near-real time
situational awareness of flood events so that state and local
governments, and businesses can respond in a way that minimizes
risk and protects vulnerable populations," said Emmalina Glinskis,
Floodbase Head of Public Sector Partnerships.
About Floodbase
Floodbase — a data provider and
reporting agent — partners with re/insurers and humanitarian
organizations to profitably design, underwrite, and monitor
parametric flood insurance products. Built on nearly a decade of
groundbreaking science, our proprietary solution continuously
monitors flooding worldwide. Pairing decades of historical flood
data with near real-time monitoring makes it possible to cover
large corporate and public sector clients against previously
uninsurable economic loss from flooding.
Contact our team of experts at hello@floodbase.com to partner on
parametric flood insurance solutions that help close the flood
insurance gap.
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SOURCE Floodbase