QuantCube Technology and the French space agency CNES have announced the successful delivery of the SCO FloodDAM Digital Twin, a cutting-edge flood warning and risk mapping prototype.
The prototype is designed to detect, monitor, assess, and predict the financial and socio-economic risks of flood events. It leverages continental water data from Earth observation systems, in-situ ground sensors, and drone data. This data is processed through advanced hydrological and hydrodynamic models, enabling flood re-analysis and forecasting across various scenarios generated by the digital twin.
The announcement highlights the collaborative efforts of a consortium that includes CNES, NASA, and other organizations, supported by the Space for Climate Observatory (SCO) initiative. This international program focuses on developing advanced tools for climate monitoring, mitigation, and adaptation. A total of nine organizations contributed to delivering five key capabilities:
- Flood detection and warning (USGS, VigiCrues, vorteX.io, JPL).
- Near real-time flood extent mapping and monitoring of ongoing events using Earth observation imagery (CNES-CLS).
- Re-analysis and short-term forecasting of flood conditions, including water levels, velocity, and free-surface elevation maps using high-fidelity hydrodynamic models over localized areas (CERFACS).
- Financial risk estimation for floods in near real-time and post-event scenarios (QuantCube Technology).
- On-demand flood rapid mapping with visualizations available through the open national hydrological platform, hydroweb.next (CNES-CS Group).
The project focused on two sites for analysis—the Garonne Marmandaise catchment in France and the Ohio catchment in the United States—with the consortium harnessing standardized open-source software and data, as well as state-of-the-art modelling and data assimilation techniques to create the SCO FloodDAM-DT.
The prototype provides an estimation of the financial risk associated with flooding events in agricultural areas in the selected test areas. This information can then be used by governments and institutions, such as insurers, real estate funds, financial institutions, and other entities concerned with the physical risk associated with assets.
“Almost every day, terrible floods prove that the planet’s water cycle is increasingly susceptible to disruption. One of the first SCO-certified projects, FloodDam, has evolved into a digital twin, building on the processing chain originally developed to create an essential tool for flood risk prediction and impact assessment. This real technical and technological achievement is the fruit of a remarkable French-American collaboration, reminding us of the importance of cooperation in adapting to our changing world,” said Frédéric Bretar, head of the SCO program at CNES.
Thanh-Long Huyhn, co-founder and CEO of QuantCube Technology, remarked, “Through harnessing a combination of earth observation data, continental water data, in-situ remote sensing, and hydrological models, we have demonstrated that it is possible to produce large-scale prediction and financial risk impact indicators for flood events on agriculture. The possible use cases for this kind of technology extend across industries and beyond, from trading and asset management to national governments and agencies, and it is our intention to fully explore these applications.”
Raquel Rodriguez Suquet, earth observation applications engineer at CNES, added, “Thanks to the support of the Space for Climate Observatory alliance, the FloodDAM-DT project, jointly with the IDEAS (Integrated Digital Earth Analysis and System) project supported via NASA's Earth Science Technology Office by the Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) program, have proven what can be achieved through international collaboration and data sharing. The result is an Earth System Digital Twin (ESDT) that enables researchers, decision-makers, and policymakers to visualize, analyze, and evaluate the impact of extreme environmental events on target regions.”