Geographic context
Beforehand covers ten pilot cities: Amsterdam, Auckland, Boston, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto. City boundaries follow official definitions published by the relevant local governments.
Past weather events and impacts
Events are documented weather occurrences, such as floods and storms.
Impacts are documented consequences, such as property damage, disruption, service interruptions, and emergency response.
Data sources. For US cities, event data comes from NOAA’s Storm Events Database. For non-US cities, sources vary and may include meteorological agencies, incident reports, emergency records, and other public publishers.
Database coverage may not be continuous. Locations may be recorded as coordinates, named areas, infrastructure, road segments, or citywide context.
Amsterdam records are integrated from Dutch-language public sources. Some locations, impacts, and descriptions appear untranslated, in the original Dutch. See Methodology and limitations.
Ongoing projects
Projects are government or utility initiatives intended to reduce or manage the effects of extreme weather.
Data sources. US records come from capital improvement plans and other public project sources. Non-US records come from available public datasets and documents. Publisher and source links are retained where available.
Project records may omit precise locations, design standards, or protection boundaries. Proximity alone does not establish that a project protects the selected asset.
There is no comprehensive public list of projects classified as “resilience projects.” Beforehand identifies relevant projects based on their published descriptions. Information not provided by a source is shown as Not supplied rather than inferred.
How locations are derived
Event, impact, and project records often lack precise coordinates and may refer to multiple neighborhoods or geographic features. Beforehand displays the most specific location supported by the source. When precise data is unavailable, the next most specific supported geography is shown. Location precision therefore varies by record.
Source freshness. Public sources follow different update schedules. A refresh date appears only when provided by the source. The report date shows when the page was generated, not when each source was last updated.
Known limitations
- Public-record coverage, terminology, location detail, and timing vary by source and city. The absence of a returned record does not mean that no event, impact, or project exists.
- Proximity does not establish that an event affected the asset or that a project protects it.
- Project status, location, design, protection area, responsibility, capacity, and budget may be incomplete or inapplicable to the selected asset.
- Beforehand does not produce a risk score, assess asset vulnerability, or estimate future losses.