Floods in the News, 2019–2026: Seasonality, Geography and Tone of Global Flood Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how floods were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 411,113 de-duplicated flood articles, and set that coverage beside 57,116 research papers and 15,061 patent families on floods. Six results stand out: Seasonality. On average 38.75% of each year's flood coverage appears in July, August and September. Attention, not occurrence. Floods took a 39% smaller share of news in 2020 than in 2019. Their share peaked in July 2021, the month of the European and Henan floods, at 57.91 articles per 10,000. Geography. India's share of located flood news is 1.53 times its share of all news. The United States, the largest source of located flood articles (33.75%), is under-represented at 0.7. Among the 20 countries with the most articles, Indonesia (6.2), Nepal (5.21) and the Philippines (4.85) are the most over-represented. Within India, Sikkim (16.87), Himachal Pradesh (6.3) and Assam (4.53) lead; within the United States, Vermont (9.68), Hawaii (4.14) and Kentucky (3.56). Tone and urgency. 72.6% of flood articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 83.4% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 23.3% of raw matches for flood vocabulary were automated river-gauge warnings or figurative uses. Counting them would inflate coverage, and would make it look American. Research and invention. Flood papers grew from 6.52 to 10.42 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025. Flood patent families grew 3.48-fold from 2015 to 2024, and 84.6% of them were filed in China.