Predicting the Path
Introducing Bellwether’s Hurricane Prediction and Response Tools
Sometimes, we can spot a hurricane weeks away. In 2018, Hurricane Florence took two weeks to make landfall in North Carolina after forming off the coast of Africa. But increasingly hurricanes are coming in faster, rapidly intensifying from tropical depressions to named tropical storms to high-category hurricanes. Hurricane Michael, which hit Florida just weeks after Florence, transformed from a tropical depression to a Category 5 hurricane in just 72 hours.
The age of rapid intensification requires rapid prediction—and rapid response. Today, Bellwether, X’s moonshot to understand and anticipate changes across our planet, is releasing a new set of AI tools to help anticipate, prepare for, and respond to hurricanes.
These new tools help map the predicted paths of a hurricane by an average of seven days out, and up to 15, ranked based on probability and severity. By combining Bellwether’s deep understanding of geospatial data with publicly available hurricane prediction models, the tools can chart hurricane paths down to the level of individual buildings. Governments, insurers, reinsurers, and corporations can then overlay these predicted paths against critical infrastructure they care about—hospitals, substations, bridges, real estate holdings—and get targeted damage predictions that are continuously updated as the forecast evolves.
A retrospective storm analysis. Bellwether's tools can map the predicted paths of a hurricane, showing where the storm will hit and how severe the damage will be. This real-time intelligence also enables insurance providers to ensure homeowners receive claim payouts significantly faster.
Every Second Counts
When a hurricane begins to form, there’s limited time to make high-stakes decisions, often with incomplete information. It’s challenging to understand where the storm will hit, how severe the damage will be, which neighborhoods and staff to evacuate, which critical facilities need to be sandbagged or hardened, and where to preposition disaster response supplies and personnel.
And because emergency response budgets are finite, a county only has so many chances each year to mobilize bulldozers, pre-position sandbags, and stage responders. If communities spend that budget preparing for a storm that veers elsewhere, the resources may not be there when the next one comes. Missteps can mean the difference between wasted resources and critical investments, lasting damage or a quick recovery.
Bellwether’s hurricane tools are designed to help people make these decisions faster and more accurately. Teams can ask plain-language questions: Which facilities, and how many, sit in the high-confidence damage zone? Where can we minimize the risk to emergency responders? This real-time intelligence also enables insurance providers to strategically pre-position adjusters, ensuring homeowners receive claim payouts significantly faster. Critical decisions that used to take hours of analysis can now be done in minutes.
Drone footage captured after a hurricane in Saipan. Bellwether's tools can quickly analyze this imagery to accelerate the release of disaster relief funding.
The Best Recovery is a Quick Recovery
After landfall, Bellwether’s tools can dramatically speed the time it takes to issue a Federal Disaster Declaration and unlock recovery funds. An essential step in that process is for a community to complete a preliminary damage assessment—a process that involves documenting damage door-to-door across five FEMA categories, from “not affected” to "destroyed." This process can take weeks, delaying declarations and preventing citizens and communities from receiving the federal aid they need to repair and rebuild.
Bellwether tools help speed up this process, classifying damage to each structure and aggregating the results into a FEMA-ready report. We shared more about this process in this recent post about a disaster response simulation we did in partnership with Kansas City’s Emergency Management team. We’re currently working with McGill, a specialist insurance and reinsurance broker, to test these tools against insurance portfolios, in order to speed up claim payments directly to impacted home and property owners. By using this information to deploy adjusters in advance of a hurricane, McGill can reduce costs and better serve homeowners and businesses.
If you are interested in learning more please reach out to us on hello-bellwether@google.com.