About FloodLink

FloodLink is a preventive flood alert system. It was created in response to the DANA floods that hit Valencia, Spain, in October 2024, and the flooding in Madrid in 2025, with one mission: to warn people before the water arrives.

Why FloodLink

Satellites and weather models see the storm coming. They don't see the street. FloodLink fills the gap between satellite-level data and street-level reality: a live map that flags the cities where rain is about to turn into floods, and sensors that measure what the water is actually doing where people live.

How the alerts work

• Every three hours, FloodLink reads the latest NOAA GFS forecast: how much rain will fall in the next 6 hours, and how wet the ground already is.
• It checks that forecast for cities of 15,000 people or more, from the open GeoNames places database, that sit in areas with a high baseline flood risk.
• Heavy rain on ground that is already wet raises the score. Each city gets a level: Medium, High or Extreme.
• When a city's level changes, the alert appears on the map and is posted on X at @FloodLink.

What's on the map

• Flood alerts: cities currently at Medium, High or Extreme.
• Rain alerts: places with notable rain in the forecast, below flood-alert level.
• Flood news: recent reports of floods and flood warnings, gathered from news feeds and refreshed through the day.
• Rain forecast 6h: NOAA's rainfall forecast for the next six hours, refreshed every hour.

FloodLink nodes

Forecasts say where rain will fall. Nodes say what the water is actually doing. A FloodLink node is a water-level sensor placed by a street, a river or a drain. It feeds its readings to the live map and sends alerts for its area. Three models are available to reserve, from $25.

Where it's going

The long-term plan is a Weather OS: a decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN) of nodes run by people and organisations around the world, each adding hyper-local weather data. Node operators would be rewarded for the data they contribute through a token-based system. Beyond public safety, that ground-level data can serve autonomous systems, such as delivery robots and self-driving vehicles, that need real-time conditions at street level.

Part of LAIA

FloodLink is part of LAIA, an innovation lab working on cities and infrastructure. The alert engine and the data behind the map are open source under the MIT licence, on GitHub. For questions or partnerships, contact LAIA.