How Spain Turned AI Into a Flood-Fighting Tool

An AI flood system along the Ebro River is cutting response times and offering Europe a new playbook for climate resilience

5 Mar 2025

Spain is quietly rewriting the playbook on flood preparedness. Along the Ebro River, regional governments have turned to artificial intelligence to anticipate floods before they overwhelm towns and fields.

The project centers on Zaragoza and Huesca, where officials partnered with Amazon Web Services on a €17.2 million system designed to spot trouble early. It blends real-time data with predictive models, giving emergency teams a clearer picture of what is coming and when.

Thousands of sensors dot the landscape, measuring rainfall, river levels, and soil moisture. Their readings flow into cloud-based systems that compare current conditions with weather forecasts and historical patterns. The result is a steady stream of risk updates, refreshed every few minutes, and displayed on live dashboards used by first responders.

That speed matters. Officials say the system can shave as much as 45 minutes off response times, a window that can mean the difference between orderly evacuations and chaos.

“This is not just about warnings,” said Javier Sánchez, an infrastructure advisor in Aragon. “It is about acting before the storm dictates the terms.”

Trust was a hurdle from the start. To meet European data protection rules, AWS built local data centers so information never leaves Spain. That decision eased privacy concerns and made it easier for other regions to consider joining the network.

The benefits are already spreading beyond emergency services. Farmers in Huesca are using the alerts to plan irrigation and protect crops as weather patterns grow less predictable. Officials are also exploring links with neighboring countries, a sign that flood risks rarely stop at borders.

The system is not flawless. Rural areas still struggle with aging infrastructure, and AI models can stumble when faced with rare, extreme storms that lack historical data. Even so, experts argue these gaps will narrow as more data flows in and investment continues.

Spain’s experiment shows how technology, used carefully and locally, can turn climate anxiety into practical action. For a continent facing rising waters, it is a lesson worth studying.