WaterWatch likely to become vital tool as flooding increases

When floodwaters entered the home of his grandmother in Carrick-on-Shannon, James Heffernan, a student at Coláiste Mhuire, saw at first hand the devastation it caused.

That’s what prompted him and classmate Charlie Murtagh to come up with their AI-powered early flood warning system ‘WaterWatch’ – which was named as winner of the The CIÉ Group Award,

“We had [already] wanted to revolve our project around something to do with flooding, because we knew how big a problem it is in Ireland,” says James.

The programme devised by the two TY students pulls in data from a range of sources, such as the Office of Public Works, Met Éireann and Open Meteo, and with the analytical capabilities of AI, uses it to predict floods.

Charlie did much of the work on building the app, using Python and a website called Streamlit.

“Then we gathered data from multiple different sources, and then trained the model on those sources just to predict the flooding,” he explains.

At this stage, the app runs on computers, but it can be put on a phone. “It could be useful for a lot of different people,” Charlie continues. “We have friends who are farmers, and we asked them ‘would this be helpful for you?’ because their fields are flooding, and they said it would be great. And so that’s kind of who we made it for – and then obviously, for James’s Granny as well.

James believes the need for their system will grow, because there has been what he describes as “a pretty drastic” increase in flooding in Ireland.

“Especially over the last five years.”