A developer from Enniscorthy has developed a new national flood prediction app.
Gavyn Pedley, who originally hails from Dublin, resides in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, and has developed this app which will automatically alert people about the possibility of flooding in their local area and is said to be accurate to within 10 metres at street level.
Mr Pedley has been analysing data and developing products and solutions in Ireland, Denmark and Spain over the last two decades.
The Flood Predictor app includes a free interactive flood intelligence map with access to coastal surge data and real-time gauge readings. It will also include products behind a pay wall, with the personal flood protection with email alerts, costing €99 per year and a separate business product for over €299 per year.
It will combine publicly available real time weather, river gauge data and soil moisture with AI, computer programming and machine learning.
Speaking about this development, Mr Pedley has said that he was motivated to create this app and website after witnessing the horrific flood damage which took place in Enniscorthy due to Storm Chandra at the end of January.
"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", he said. "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".
Elsewhere, Mr Pedley said that he added information from the EU Copernicus Climate Change Service, which included highly detailed lidar maps of Irish topographical contours and landscape. He also added information and satellite maps from the US Space Agency, NASA.
"I spent about a month properly thinking it through, jotting down ideas of how to construct it, and then I started building the first flood prediction model."
"Over the last couple of weeks, we've added machine learning to it, and now we have an incredible level of accuracy for figuring out exactly the probability of a flood in each area," Mr Pedley added.
"In the middle of a flood, you might have a six hour warning. You need to know if it is time to move the car. You need to know if it is time to get the wedding album out from under the TV and put it upstairs", he added. "You need to know if you must evacuate".
The Flood Predictor app will be available on the website on floodpredictor.ie.
There will also be another app which will allow people to receive live updates and local flooding warnings direct to their phones which will be launched very shortly.
"It's national. I have all the river systems in the country mapped," Mr Pedley said. "Full topographical maps of the entire place. Every single flood going back maybe 20 years is there, so people can read what happened last year, or the year before. How was their town affected".
Regarding accuracy, Mr Pedley has said that his app has a score of 0.0009 on the 'Brier Score', who quantifies on how close predictive probabilities are to outcomes, which are the same scores Met Éireann use to check the accuracy of its own forecasts.
Pedley's score makes it approximately 85% accurate which will improve with more information as the model is being regularly updated.
He also went on to say that he cannot understand why the Government are saying it will take another 10 years to develop a local flood prediction service.
