Floodbase Aims to Bring More Real-Time Clarity to Flood Risk

As people from Texas to Wisconsin dry themselves out from recent floods, a New York-based company called Floodbase has released a product designed to give public agencies a closer look at the damage all that water can cause.

The company, which has reportedly raised $19.7 million since its founding in 2015, has launched a service that provides “a near real-time flood hazard layer to government agencies and corporations who conduct damage assessments or visualize impacts to critical assets or populations,” according to a statement.

The data from that service can help agencies plan response and recovery work, the statement reads. All that, in turn, can help with estimates of insurance claims.

Insurance concerns, of course, are top of mind for many people who live in areas prone to flooding, especially as climate change produces more powerful storms. Florida is one of the main states where rising prices for flood insurance are causing major headaches.

As that happens, local and state governments continue to test and deploy technologies that offer better views into flood risk.

For instance, Corte Madera, Calif., recently launched an interactive tool that uses data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Coastal Storm Modeling System to game out various flooding scenarios.

Flood damage in the U.S. runs between $180 billion and $496 billion annually, according to a U.S. Senate report.

The new offering from Floodbase stems the company’s selection last year to provide better flood analytics to the U.S. federal government. Services provided by the company include daily flood monitoring via satellite imagery and deep learning hydrology models, mapping of ongoing floods in near real time and more sophisticated forecasting data, among other features.

Floodbase now has made such capabilities available to other customers, starting on Aug. 1.

“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’s 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.”