Irish consultant launches AI-powered national flood predictor app

Gavyn Pedley, an innovation consultant with two decades of experience in data analysis across Ireland, Denmark, and Spain, has launched a freely accessible Flood Predictor website and app. This groundbreaking tool offers automatic alerts about local flood likelihoods, boasting an impressive accuracy of within 10 meters at street level. The system integrates publicly available real-time weather, soil moisture, and river gauge data with advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning, and programming.

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It's not the day that it floods, and it's not even looking at this massive wall of water just leaping through the town. It's not watching car parks completely flooded that gets you. It's three weeks later when you're driving down Island Road, and there are people you know still, three weeks in, pulling their belongings out and putting them in skips.

This initiative stands in stark contrast to the timeline projected by senior officials from the Office of Public Works, who estimated a decade to develop a similar service. Pedley's solution was developed in a mere two months, demonstrating the power of agile innovation. His motivation stemmed from witnessing the devastating impact of Storm Chandra on his hometown of Enniscorthy in County Wexford.

Pedley shared the profound emotional toll of the floods, describing not just the immediate destruction but the lingering aftermath. He recounted seeing residents still removing damaged belongings weeks later and expressed his heartbreak at witnessing a father discarding his child's flood-damaged duvet. This personal connection, as a parent himself, fueled his determination to create a tool that could prevent such devastation.

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The thing that really broke my heart was one of the people down in the town throwing out a kid's duvet, and the look on his face was just heartbreaking. I have a little girl of my own. She has a dinosaur duvet, and if I had to throw that out, it would break me.

The Met Eireann's yellow rain warning for County Wexford during Storm Chandra had indicated potential flooding, but the scale of inundation that followed far exceeded local expectations. Pedley's Flood Predictor leverages a vast array of data sources, including Met Eireann's weather stations, offshore buoys, coastal observatories, weather radar, satellite inputs, and even a network of private weather stations, to provide comprehensive and timely flood warnings.

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The consensus was that flooding would happen. But were people expecting the kind of flooding that would float a car to Wexford? No, there wasn’t any understanding that it would get that bad.