Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NASA's Interactive Flood Maps

Posted by samzenpus on from the five-feet-high-and-rising dept.

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."

23 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Death Valley by LasVeganLucy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Somehow Death Valley, California seems to fill up with water with a slight rise in sea level.

    1. Re:Death Valley by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The Netherlands has a similar problem. I seems like the algorithm for this ignores the Netherlands Delta Works.

    2. Re:Death Valley by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1-2 meters worldwide, maybe not. 1-2 meters in an area where engineers need to improve an existing system, I'd give them a chance. They are already planning for it. Considering the map shows 1 meter as flooding the entire country, I doubt it factors in that some regions are already below sea level.

      I'm not talking about problems when there are natural disasters. Many regions around the world would have problems with natural disaster flooding even if the oceans receded several meters. The map implies those lands would be underwater under dry conditions, which assumes either an instantaneous rise or that engineers aren't building systems to prevent flooding.

      Another post below has a link to where the creator of the web site lists his limitations. The fifth one is about coastal defenses.

    3. Re:Death Valley by Grismar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, the Dutch water defenses can take quite a bit and do so regularly when storm surges occur. Of course, when a storm surge would come on top of a sea level increase of 1m overall, that would cause flooding sooner, at least temporarily.

      However, this lame website simply colors every bit of land that just happens to be below the set level and ignores any defense that would keep the water out, even at the lower settings. It's utter bollocks and I'm betting it's only there to generate ad revenue. Oh /., how sad to see you slip into senility.. (not directed at parent, but at the so-called editors that decided this should run)

    4. Re:Death Valley by Immerman · · Score: 2, Funny

      Right, the only reason not to factor in complex human factors into what is otherwise a simple elevation based color-by-number script is to generate ad revenue. And obviously the fact that there's a few spots where humans have built massive infrastructure to hold back the sea means that a map showing what would naturally be underwater with various changes in sea level is completely pointless. Good thing you're here to call them on it.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. Lex Luthor was on to something. by Brad1138 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Lex Luthor was on to something. by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

      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...

      Forget that noise;
      1. Buy large oil company.
      2. Begin drilling wells off the coast of large city... at a 45 degree angle.
      3. Frack baby, frack!
      4. giant sinkhole swallows 20 miles of coastline.
      5. PROFIT!

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  3. Sweet by girlintraining · · Score: 2

    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
  4. Where's the Waterworld Option by ATestR · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Where's the Waterworld Option by jonadab · · Score: 2

      > This darn thing only allows for a 60M rise.

      They probably designed it to assume that all the water has to actually come from somewhere.

      There simply isn't anywhere enough water available to raise the ocean levels by the kilometer you propose, not by a long shot -- not with the ocean basins being anywhere near as deep as they currently are. If you want to make it that deep, you have to raise the ocean floor and/or lower the continental plates. But, of course, if you start changing that stuff, the simplistic model NASA used to calculate the coastlines wouldn't work. Once you start raising and lowering whole large sections of the earth's crust, Florida might end up being at a higher elevation than Wisconsin, who knows? All bets would be off, and all our maps would be worthless.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    2. Re:Where's the Waterworld Option by pjbgravely · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What no negative? I wanted to see what it would look like with sea levels lower.

      --
      Star Trek, there maybe hope.
    3. Re:Where's the Waterworld Option by jonadab · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Also, 1000 meters of ocean level rise wouldn't really be enough to give you a Waterworld scenario. It would be a global catastrophy, certainly, but there would still be quite a bit of dry land -- in large continuous strips, some which would extend for more than a quarter of the earth's circumference in length. Dry land would certainly not be so difficult to locate as to approach mythical status. A lot of Asia would still be above water (not just the Himalayas, either), plus a good portion of Africa, a sizable chunk of North America (just for example, Denver would still be more than half a kilometer above the new elevated ocean level), a long strip of South America running from Columbia all the way to Tiera Del Fuego, and quite a bit of Antarctica (yes, even with all the ice melted off), as well as various mountains and islands scatter around every geopolitical region in the world.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  5. That's odd... by cirby · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:That's odd... by ankhank · · Score: 2

      The "current IPCC report" 2007 (Fourth) explicitly did not consider sea level rise and gave _lower_ numbers than the Third
      http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/ar5-leaflet.pdf
      "due in 2014, will provide an update"
      What do we know better now?
      Example: See the illustrations at: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/rosenzweig_03/

  6. Not NASA by ripler · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not NASA by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Bottom right corner of the page says "Data provided by NASA".

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  7. I don't see how NASA's name got attached to this. by mongoose(!no) · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  8. 5 years old, and not NASA by eggstasy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Why the hell is NASA... by Goaway · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Wrong algorithm by MathiasRav · · Score: 2

    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.

  11. Re:Biblical fail by rrohbeck · · Score: 2

    He had guns.

    --
    thegodmovie.com - watch it
  12. Re:Congress take notice! by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 2

    That's what doesn't make sense to me. The current mean temperature of the ocean is about 4C, according to this source. And at 4C, the CTE is zero.

    But I have a hard time squaring that with this graph

    The graph makes it look like most of the Earth's oceans have surface temperatures significantly higher. Maybe the penetration that warmth to lower levels isn't very great?

  13. Wow! by BootysnapChristAlive · · Score: 2

    Now that is such...