How rainfall accumulation, NOAA alerts, soil moisture, SAR flood extent, and terrain drainage combine into one flood risk score.
🧠 OPEN BRAIN DASHBOARD LIVEA riverbank swells 4 inches overnight. Water hasn't breached levees yet—but your phone stays silent. Meanwhile, a Pandita Brain Dashboard user 50 miles upstream sees their flood risk score spike to 8.2 out of 10, triggering neighborhood alerts before the first sandbag is filled. The difference? Real-time signal fusion. This is how we calculate flood risk before the water arrives.
The Pandita Brain Dashboard flood risk score is not a single number. It's a weighted consensus of five independent Earth observation signals, each feeding live data every 6–12 hours. Think of it as having five flood witnesses—some more reliable than others—voting simultaneously on danger level.
Each signal is normalized to a 0–10 scale, then multiplied by its weight percentage. The sum produces your live flood risk score—updated continuously on the Brain Dashboard. In Christchurch, New Zealand (a region with seasonal flood pressure from the Avon and Heathcote rivers), this model works in real time:
When NOAA issues a flood watch or warning, that signal jumps to 9–10 severity automatically. This overrides a lower community score, ensuring official meteorological authority is never dismissed. The Brain Dashboard then flags all neighborhoods downstream as elevated risk, even if local rainfall hasn't yet peaked.
Here's the secret ingredient most flood models miss: wet soil floods faster than dry soil. If ground moisture is already 75%+ from prior rain, a new system's runoff has nowhere to soak. The SMAP soil moisture sensor (20% weight) and SAR radar (15% weight) detect this pre-saturation. When both sensors agree the ground is waterlogged, the entire score receives a 1.15× amplification multiplier. A 6.2 score becomes 7.1 instantly.
This is why Christchurch's score climbed sharply even before heavy rain arrived—the Avon catchment was already sodden from the prior week's system.
To see live flood signals for your region, visit the Pandita Brain Dashboard now. For detailed city-by-city flood risk analysis, check the Disaster Report module.
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