US city predicts which houses will flood up to 36 hours in advance

The City of Virginia Beach on the US east coast is using big data to predict flooding across the Virginia coastline and allow emergency services to prepare a response. The StormSense project, developed by academics at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, will feed water levels, wind speeds, air pressure, and other data into a model which can predict which areas will be flooded up to 36 hours in advance. Emergency services will then be able to see the predictions visualised as a map, which the project team eventually plan to make publicly available, allowing residents to take their own measures against flooding.