I found this fascinating Google Maps hack to show the effect of rising sea levels caused by global warming.
New sea-levels of up to +14m are overlaid on top of the Google maps or satellite imagery. The sea levels are from NASA satellite radar measurements – so they’re not exact, Ruth – but it gives a good indication of the effect of major sea level rises. Luckily, our house is 27m above mean sea-level!
Read more at Alex Tingle’s Firetree site.
It is also a great showcase of the power of free online mapping (that’s why I fully support the Free Our Data campaign being run by the Guardian Technology section).
Great fun! Interesting how much of England is vulnerable and how little of Ireland, Scotland or Wales may flood.
Of course, the people who do this kind of thing have Too Much Time On Their Hands.
Glad you had a good time in the Lakes.
The SRTM mission was not as successful as first planned and it’s a shame it only covers between 60 deg N/S (and it had lots of holes for quite a few years) but it’s not a bad global model. Global geoid models are better than this but this is topography. The prob is that people lose sight of the fact that the model is only accurate to +/-10m in the vertical and run tidal predictions of, say, 15 metres and assume their house at 15m is flooded – but it may well not be (or it may be flooded at 5m). The EA would use a far more accurate model in the UK – in fact they base their flood predictions on the Ordnance Survey height model which is accurate to centimetres I believe.
Wrt the Free the Data campaign. I have some issues. Yes, the tax payer pays for the collection of data and, under FOI rules, it is ‘freely available’ (for an admin cost as expected). However, by the time most users see (and need) the data it has been processed, QA’ed and assessed against a whole host of other navigation/non-navigational sources. Surely the public expect that sort of service? When you buy a navigational chart it’s not just plain survey data. In the US all their charts are freely available but then NGA does not have to break even. You could say that we are far less of a burden on the tax payer because you don’t have to pay for the running of the OS nor the Hydrographic Office. Indeed we make a profit which gets fed back into the Treasury. So the public either pay with higher prices to run these organisations or pay for the product resulting from them. There’s no such thing as a free lunch so they say.
I agree that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but the current commercial model for the OS & Hydrographic Office means that the data use is restricted by price to very large organisations. Citizens and SMEs have little or no access to the data that they help fund. The Free Our Data campign argues that providing free access to the data (at taxpayer expense, yes) would enable more innovative use and would, in the long run, end up with a net gain to the Treasury through boosting the UK economy.