PetaBencana.id: Real-time flood mapping in Jakarta

Jakarta is the world’s second largest megacity, and experiences frequent floods every year. The floods have a serious impact on the 30 million residents of the greater Jakarta area, and rapid urbanization in recent years have increased Jakarta’s vulnerability to flooding risks.

Gathering flood information has been extremely time-consuming in the past. Information had to be collected from responders on the ground, and flooding locations had to be recorded and mapped manually. Because of a lack of data, very little information was available to coordinate response and rescue initiatives.

“There was very little formal data available on the locations of flooding, but we could see massive spikes in Twitter activity during heavy rainfall events. We knew it took the government a long time to collect, consolidate and map the floods to organise response, so the potential of using the tweets as a source of real-time information was immediately apparent,” said Tomas Holderness, Co-Chief Investigator of PetaBencana.

[...]