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."
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.
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.
It was not actually done by NASA, and if it was, it would probably not have made a terribly big dent in their budget, seeing as how it was actually done by some guy just for fun.