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New Interactive Map For Understanding Global Flood Risks
An anonymous reader writes "Using computations on the massive near-global SRTM surface model from NASA, this map lets you query watersheds, interactively set the sea-level and flood the world (North America at 500m increase in sea-level), or play around with river thresholds on a global or regional scale (computed rivers around NYC/NJ). It can be used to get an understanding of the watersheds and water flow paths in your local neighborhood; do you know where rain (or pollutants) that falls in your backyard end up? The map is freely available to the public."
Why not go the whole hog and allow for a FALL in sea-level by enabling negative values? Surely we have the necessary sea-floor maps and people who think climate change is running the other way.
So according to the map, Netherlands is already completely flooded with just millimetres of sea level rise. Somehow I think they forgot some factors.
Best hydrology resource I've seen online, sorry to be so positive.
http://climate.nasa.gov/intera... found here http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multim... along with other goodies or you could spend time going thru http://nasasearch.nasa.gov/sea...
redneck geek
If we start taking this sort of alarmist garbage seriously, my beachfront condo might get reassigned into a higher-risk flood zone, potentially increasing my insurance payments to something vaguely resembling actual cost! Then, if it should happen to flood for a third time this decade, I'll have to make do with less taxpayer money to rebuild it. How is that fair?
(In case it wasn't abundantly obvious, I don't actually espouse that point of view; but there's a reason why flood-estimate maps are Big Political Business at least in the US: because stuff getting flooded happens approximately all the time, we have the 'National Flood Insurance Program'. Your level of estimated risk governs your premiums; but not your payout in the event of an incident, so people are even less happy than usual to hear from Mr. Pessimism, when it comes time to redraw the Flood Insurance Rate Maps, regardless of his accuracy.
Luckily, with a suitable understanding of the political process and access to a few lawyers and engineers, it is frequently possible to evade such heinous miscarriages of justice as 'being classified as high risk just because your property has a recent history of flooding' and the like.
What's more worrying is that a lot of farmland is going away if there's a rise. And a considerable amount of the farmland in California may suffer.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Farmland is where we decide to farm, it doesn't just "go away". If you mean potential farmland or arable land, climate change causes it to go away in some places, and it causes lots of it to appear in other places. But that's been going on since the last ice age and humanity deals with it easily.
If all the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and all the glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). I've seen numbers in this range from several different sources, e.g. Nat Geo says 216 ft.
Bad, sure. But 500m is not even in the bounds of reality.
Am I missing something, or have they missed the Great Basin? It seems they depict the Columbia River watershed abutting the Colorado River watershed and they both appear to go all the way to the base of the Sierras.