Why do this? We have little historic data on surface water flooding. As far as I'm aware, this is the first attempt to create a detailed geospatial dataset for these events. Such data has potential applications in validating flood forecasts and models, as well as planning.
The outputs are:
• A set of 56 downloadable interactive maps of flooding impacts on each of the key dates identified
• geoJSON files containing the data for all maps, and each map individually
• A csv file providing details of all of the urban flash flood events detected, including those which weren't mapped due to a lack of geographical detail
Data is free and publicly available
Users can explore individual events, e.g. this is the map for the severe flash flood event which happened in London on 25th July 2021
https://www.climatenode.org/maps/UFFE_map_20210725.html
The project used two distinct NLP techniques. Text classification was used to detect potential urban flash flood events from articles and distinguish them from other types of flooding. Named Entity Recognition was used to extract the names of places, streets, buildings, etc.