🌊 How FloodCheckGH works

FloodCheckGH helps you understand how flood-prone a location in Ghana is before you rent or buy a home, shop, or plot of land. Search a place, use your GPS, or tap the map — you get a risk rating, the recorded flooding history nearby, the physical factors driving the risk, and plain guidance.

How the rating is calculated

The 0–100 score is the stronger of two independent layers, then mapped to Minimal → Low → Moderate → High → Severe:

• Documented history — has this exact area flooded before? We check curated records of real Ghana floods (see sources) and how severe/frequent they were.
• Live terrain & water — even with no recorded flood, is the spot physically exposed? We check the elevation and local relief (is it the low ground water drains toward, and is it flat?) and the distance to the nearest river, lagoon, drain or coastline.

Taking the stronger of the two means a place with a real flood disaster stays rated high, and a low-lying riverside plot with no recorded event is still flagged as risky.

Where the data comes from

• Flood history (1935–today): NADMO reports, news archives, academic studies, and UN OCHA / ReliefWeb disaster records — including the Gold-Coast-era Accra floods, the June 3 2015 disaster, the 2023 Akosombo Dam spillage, and the 2025–2026 Accra floods.
• Elevation: the Copernicus GLO-90 digital elevation model (via Open-Meteo).
• Rivers, lagoons & drains: OpenStreetMap.
• Maps: OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap, and Esri satellite imagery.

All 16 regions are covered. New authoritative disaster records are ingested from ReliefWeb, EM-DAT, DesInventar/NADMO and the Dartmouth Flood Observatory.

Documented vs. representative

Each event is labelled so you know what's verified:

• documented a specific recorded flood — many carry a source link (Wikipedia, ReliefWeb, UNICEF, news, academic).
• ≈ representative illustrative of recurring seasonal flooding in that area, not one specific verified incident.

Flood season

Southern Ghana has two rainy seasons, so it floods worst in June and October. Northern Ghana has one, peaking August–September (often worsened by upstream dam spillage). Each report shows the peak-risk months for that location.

Limits — please read

• Flood footprints are approximate, and the history is a curated snapshot — comprehensive for known hotspots, but it won't list every street or every past flood.
• Radar-based satellite methods (and the app in general) are strongest for river and dam-spillage floods; fast urban flash floods can be under-represented.
• This is informational only — not a substitute for a professional site survey, valuation, or insurance assessment.

See also the privacy notice.