San Francisco, Nov 5 (IANS): Google has expanded its AI flood forecasting services, first introduced in India back in 2018, to 18 additional countries across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

The company also launched "FloodHub", a platform that displays flood forecasts and shows when and where floods might occur, so that people directly at risk can get the information they need and authorities can assist them effectively.

In 2018, the company began their flood forecasting initiative to help combat the catastrophic damage from floods.

"In the first three years, we expanded our programme to cover much of India and Bangladesh, working in partnership with the Indian Central Water Commission and with the Bangladesh Water Development Board, covering an area with about 220 million people and sending out 40 million potentially life-saving alerts," said Google in a blogpost.

"In 2021, our operational systems were further expanded to cover an area with over 360 million people. Thanks to better flood prediction technology, we sent out over 115 million alerts -- that's about triple the amount we previously sent out," it added.

The company has also extended its wildfire tracking program to a few more countries after piloting it in the US.

Using new AI models based on satellite imagery, the company detect wildfire boundaries and show their real-time location in Search and Maps.

"Since July, we've covered more than 30 big wildfire events in the US and Canada, helping inform people and firefighting teams with over 7 million views in Search and Maps. Today, wildfire detection is now available in the US, Canada, Mexico and parts of Australia," said Google.