Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Interactive Flood Maps
First time accepted submitter jackandtoby writes "Whether you buy into global warming or not, you can have a go at being Charlton Heston and raise sea levels on a biblical scale thanks to NASA's online flood maps. Click away and cause your own Sim Flooding."
Where's NASA's interactive overbearing government maps?
"Here's the world tech level with more economic freedom. Now slide the slider, and see the tech level go down and deaths increase due to lagging tech as everyone's warm and socialist fuzzy goes up!"
Somehow Death Valley, California seems to fill up with water with a slight rise in sea level.
...spending their budget on this? This is NOAA's turf, not NASA's.
Maybe it's because i'm on a mobile device (Droid 3 with the included browser), but that site just seems like an ad filled annoying to use waste of bandwidth. After I changed the sea level once it wouldn't let me change it again, and somehow from the summary I imagined something that looked much cooler than google maps.
In Superman 1. I need to buy up all the real estate 20 miles inland and wait for Global warming to make me rich! Maybe I should set off some nukes at the north and south poles to help speed things up...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Sweet - more ways to kill my Sims! Actually, no. This method is slower than that; I can simulate global warming now by just taking the ladder out of the pool. :D
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This darn thing only allows for a 60M rise. I want to try out 1000M and set sail in a Trimaran.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
SWEET! Come on global watering!
The map has a lot of different levels for ocean rise, but they don't show the 0.3 meter "most probable" one from the current IPCC report.
The closest they have is one meter - three times the predicted level - and it doesn't seem to do much of anything - just a few inland lakes that magically rise in levels, even though they aren't connected to the sea.
Oh, well, I guess they'll fix that in version 2.0. Right?
Damn. It takes 20m to sink Houston
along with bangladesh. and well, other areas are not that bad off. if the change wasn't rapid the 60m doesn't look like end of the world on global scale, even if it was rapid not the end of the world.
and hey, lot's of stuff for coral to grow on.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I guess this could be useful to determine the level of risk one incurs when buying property at a given location. I say "guess", because the site is slashdotted and I have no first-hand experience of how it works and what level of detail it gives.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with NASA. It looks like a ploy to get better search rankings for firetree.net.
something something slashdot editors something.
It's based on their DEM (digital elevation model) dataset, specifically the Shuttle Radar Terrain Mapping project, but I doubt that they had anything to do with this. There's also an ad at the bottom for flood insurance. It also looks like the guy just went through and generated a blue overlay for land lower than the sea level rise you select, which wouldn't include any backwater effects from going up rivers. He's got a website about what he did here: http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/
This website is 5 years old and has been covered on Slashdot before. It has nothing to do with NASA.
Altitude information was alledgedly taken from NASA, but you could well have done it with Google Maps API.
Or simply by superimposing a transparent blue layer on Google Earth at the altitude(s) of your choice.
What's scary is that there are probably political analysts looking at the impact of higher sea levels on voting patterns, to see whether it would favor one political party or another and at what level. I just hope they're accounting for the fact that all those coastal lib'ruls whose homes would be flooded would simply move inland rather than disappearing into the sea.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Hmm. That explains why it shows the Volga delta as massively flooded at +1m. In actuality the Caspian is -27m right now already, so of course +28m would be catastrophic.
Dutch people - RUN away! Why your land has not yet been flooded is beyond me.
Why is NASA poking it's nose into this? Does this has anything to do with Aeronautics or Space? Maybe if NASA was more restrictive about mission creep we wouldn't be hitch-hiking into space with the Russians. At best NASA should be acting as a contractor launching a satellite or two for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If they have enough resources to bully their way into other Agencies areas of responsibility, maybe they have too many.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The map is wildly inaccurate. Look at this gravel pit near Petersburg, VA: Because the pit is close to sea level, the map claims it will be flooded at a 2 m sea level rise. In reality, it would probably take a 60 m sea level rise for it to flood because of the height of the surrounding terrain.
It looks like NASA just did a plane intersection with the terrain. If the height above sea level at this point is lower than a threshold, then they claim it will be flooded when the sea rises to this threshold. This is the reason why the Netherlands seems to be all flooded on the map - dams are completely ignored by this algorithm.
Look at a sea level rise map of the same gravel pit in a calculation that takes the global terrain into account. You need to set the water level to 60 m for the sea to spill over into the gravel pit.
Okay, so in addition to this not involving NASA and the data being 5 years old, the biblical references are wrong too. Heston played Moses, who parted the Red Sea. "raise sea levels on a biblical scale" would refer to the great flood, and that involved Noah (and even then he didn't cause the flood). So I have no idea what Charlton Heston has to do with this in even the most convoluted possible way.
Better known as 318230.
Fun to play with. Guess we can still make Puerto Rico a state.
2 meters puts floods on the National Mall!
Of course, that would take an awful lot of ice melting. There's only enough ice on Greenland to raise sea levels 7 meters and only enough on Antarctica to raise it 123 meters. Holy crap!
But the latter isn't likely to happen -- not totally anyway. Greenland is within the realm of reasonably likely this could happen in the next century.
I wonder what elevation data NASA is using? I work with the Lidar derived elevation data in NC every day and in the mainland behind the Outer Banks. When I crank sea level flooding up to 1m, Most of Alligator River refuge is under water. You have to crank it up to 7M on the NASA site to get the same effect... Methinks they have some data issues.
Basically, if the caps melt and your get 60m flooding, the tropical and temperate zones are unihabitable, not just from the heat, but the humidity and wet bulb issues. So, everyone will move north or to antarctica, and what are the two parts of the world missing? Antarctica and the arctic. nice. so basically, everywhere no one is goign to live we can see, but the areas we are goign to move to, we have no mapping. Brilliant.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I laughed when I saw the phrase "buy into global warming"; as if it's something being peddled by a snake oil salesman.
Too bad they cannot calculate for a DROP in see level; I try to put in negative numbers and it does not work;
More water in the Salton Sea at +7M you could argue. Where would the water come from to accumulate in Death Valley??
there's nothing positive about CAGW.
--
Glad to see my home state of Rhode Island will not be affected by any sea level rise!
...is only 26m AMSL, so say the yardsticks every half mile sticking out of the Trent. The map doesn't blue out until 40m. I call shenanigans.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Have gnu, will travel.
"...Otisburg?"
Not too bad, even at 60m rise, only about 1/2 of LA is underwater, nowhere near as much as I had hoped.
Had the height set to 60m. west coast of the US only loses a bit. Most of Florida is gone and maybe a few miles in on the eastern seaboard. I was thinking 60m would be like 30% of land lost.
Some land that my parents own near Columbia, SC, which I may inherit, will become less than a mile away from the "coast" assuming a 60m increase. Here's hoping for some beach front property by the time I'm 90!
Now that is such...
What would have made this really interesting is to see population densities with an estimate of how many people would actually be displaced at the different levels. Because really, who cares if land that no one lived on anyway is now under 2 feet of water? I vaguely remember that project floating around out there too, but my curiosity isn't sufficient to chase it down.