Green Stream Flood Monitoring and Warning System

Green Stream advises when the water rises.

More than 1 billion people worldwide live in low-lying coastal regions threatened by increasingly frequent floods. 

Green Stream takes aim at the problems caused by flooded roadways.

• Destroyed vehicles.  Every year hundreds of thousands of cars are destroyed by flood water. Just ¼ cup water in an engine destroys it and the car’s electronic systems, creating economic burden for the insurance industry and the uninsured. Flood-damaged vehicles are sold on to unsuspecting buyers.
• Safety risk: 3/4 of flood drownings involve people driving, biking or walking into flood water. Standing water causes accidents for drivers and pedestrians.
• Business disruption: Nuisance flooding causes over 100 million hours of transportation delays on the US East Coast.
• Strained resources: Emergency management spends resources responding to preventable incidents.

Current methods are good, but not enough.

• NWS Flood alerts are generalized over an area, difficult to act on. Existing predictive models are limited due to lack of granular data.
• Flood gauge information is hard for the general public to find and understand.
• NOAA/USGS gauges are large and expensive, therefore not suitable to deploy everywhere they are needed.

Solution:

Green Stream aims to reduce the negative impacts of roadway flooding by increasing situational awareness during flood events.  Our flood monitoring and warning system will report flooding to government authorities and the public in real time.

Small, low-cost sensors deployed over roadways or nearby creeks monitor the surface below. They report not only flooding, but the depth of the water at each location.

The data is transmitted through our back-end cloud platform to partner systems and applications such as municipal alert systems, mobile apps, online dashboards and mechanical solutions such as warning signs and barriers. For example, we are currently streaming water level data to North Carolina’s Flood Inundation Mapping and Alert Network https://fiman.nc.gov/fiman/# .

Benefits:

Drivers can select safer routes. Businesses, government/military installations, and schools can decide when to close. Citizens and businesses can move equipment. People can keep tabs on property and loved ones from afar.

Emergency management services will have an overview of neighborhood flooding and can deploy resources accordingly. They can close roads, activate signs/gates, and issue detailed alerts in real time. They may face fewer preventable incidents as citizens are empowered to protect themselves.

Insurance companies can use flooded roadway data to settle claims/detect fraud.

Accumulated data will help improve scientific understanding of the correlation between weather and street flooding, to improve prediction and aid in decisions about urban and infrastructure planning.

Green Stream’s flood resilience system provides an early adaptation to living with water for the many people who live and work in coastal and riverine areas.  We cannot stop the flooding, but by helping people to be more flood aware through information and warning systems, we aim to reduce losses and threats to safety in daily life and in major flood events. 

Remotely monitoring actual roadway flooding rather than extrapolating from tide gauges provides more actionable information for the general public and for emergency and transportation authorities. 

 Situational awareness for authorities and for the general public – where is it flooded now and how deep is it – is a giant step toward improving safety by avoiding preventable incidents, and responding effectively during flood events. 

The low cost, low footprint end-to-end solution is easy for municipalities and agencies to deploy and integrate with their systems. The end devices are easily installed anywhere and can be easily relocated.

The convergence of multiple IoT technologies makes our solution possible.

• The availability of low-cost, low-power electronics reduces the size of sensors making it possible to deploy them inconspicuously on urban infrastructure.
• Proliferation and falling cost of wireless communications allows sensors to report flood status in real-time.
• Affordable  cloud computing allows the capture, storage and reporting of sensor data in real-time. It allows development of machine-learning models that provide localized flood prediction services. 

1. Be the preferred flood resilience partner for customers, environmental consultants, and the public.
2. Grow and manage a sensor/communications network in flood-prone cities and counties.
3. See evidence that our solution has helped protect property and improved safety during flood events.
4. Have a talented, engaged workforce and closely collaborating partner network.
5. Continuously improve/certify hardware, firmware and back end software.
6. Identify and monitor variables that can predict flooding.
7. Collaborate on and contribute to predictive models.
8. Have enough revenues and funding to support goals.

• Build/participate in an ecosystem of organizations collaborating on R&D, data analytics, sales, marketing outreach and distribution.
• Continue to develop sensor technology to support multiple wireless communications protocols.
• Sell to national (NOAA, FEMA, USACE) and international government agencies (UNDP) to deploy large scale.
• Sell to businesses and property owners through third party dealers.
• Fund with grants and investors.
• Build and empower talent (especially tech and sales). Professionalize management.

• Use machine learning to make predictive models adaptable to local variables.

We target buyers by identifying government decision makers in flood prone regions. We introduce ourselves and our solution directly and through networking. Solution is pilot-tested with a small purchase.

We partner with other providers on proposals.

Beneficiaries build demand for solution with free access to the dashboard, and phone app. We will build this audience through outreach.

We retain customers by helping them build their warning systems and predictive models, working to improve their performance metrics. We work with their stakeholders. We stay in touch and help them build and publicize their success stories.

We are 8 team members with diverse skill sets, all interested in the Solve challenge and opportunity to make a positive impact on the world. Some of us are entrepreneurs and want to make our living by developing this solution. Some are academic experts interested in expanding research. Some are young engineers learning and applying skills to tough world problems.  We care about environment and are pro-socially motivated to solve problems for our fellow humans. We find it rewarding to build an inexpensive technical solution to an expensive environmental problem.

We aim to build a core staff of 8-10 people this year, eventually 20-30, complemented by a Business Advisory Council and wide network of partners.

The Solve challenge and our work provide an exciting opportunity to make a positive world impact. We will use people’s ideas and talents and ensure each person has a line of sight to the end results. We value learning and in this field, learning is constant. We aim to pay market rates and share success with all employees.

To achieve this, we must ensure good governance and business continuity.

• Electrical Engineering – hardware & software
• Systems Engineering
• Enterprise IT systems design, develop, scaling
• Hardened Marine Systems
• Mechanical Engineering
• Software Engineering
• PhD Oceanography
• PhD Physics
• Data Analytics, Data Science, Big Data
• Machine Learning
• Business strategy and leadership
• Marketing
• B2B and B2G solution selling
• Entrepreneurial experience

Product sales in the early years help build the network. Data and communication fees accumulate and provide recurring revenue. Configuration and software services generate service income. Devices will be distributed via third parties to commercial customers. Accumulated data sets and observations will bring future revenue opportunities.

Revenue model for the next 12 months:

Product Sales:

• Sale of Sensor Devices: (ours, plus reselling third-party device within the ecosystem)
• Data Streaming Service: Recurring accumulated revenue for our devices and third-party devices , grows with network. Includes firmware updates and firmware maintenance.
• Cloud Service Licensing:  Back-office services such as event notification service and visualization service.
• Extended Warranties
• Hardware installation
• Cloud Services Setup and Enhancement
• Integration and interfacing with customer and third-party systems

Consulting Services:

• Hardware installation
• Cloud Services Setup and Enhancement
• Integration and interfacing with customer and third-party systems

We believe Solve's innovative approach and ability to bring together an important network can accelerate our solution. Funding is important, and we also hope for:

• Introductions to business mentors, advisors, customers.
• Technical assistance with sensor and communications technology advancment.
• FCC and LoRa Alliance certification
• Support identifying locations for proof-of-concept and pilot deployments.

• Funding – early stage needs to accelerate team growth, build out product/service and serve customer demand. Grant funding and/or the right investors could provide much-needed help.
• Strong talent and partners for IoT product/service innovation is scarce in our region. We hope to connect with researchers/students/potential employees with strong skills.
• Lack of incubator/accelerator/mentors with knowledge of IoT technologies in our region. Help from outside could spark growth of expertise in our region.