fine scale maps of changing flood risks in USA

bower · #1

This turned up in my news this morning, and I thought some of our members might find it useful or interesting.
https://floodiq.com/
This site provides free access to fine scale maps of flooding risks as they change over time.
It is a tool provided by
https://firststreet.org/mission/
Enjoy!

arnorrian · #2

[mention]Bower[/mention] You better remove this, you'll get reported like I was for my opinion on beef. Climate change has been deems a political issue, so it is taboo.

bower · #3

[mention]arnorrian[/mention] Well, I'll wait and see. If someone has a problem with it, they should report it.

wxcrawler · #4

As a Hydrologist and a Meteorologist, I have a little expertise in this area. The problem with this is they use RCP 8.5 from the IPCC's AR4 as the future temperature increase. This is not realistic. Back when they did AR4, the IPCC said RCP 8.5 was considered the "worst case" scenario, with unrealistic and unlikely physics used in the model. Due to many factors, including politicization, RCP 8.5 has become "the expected" in recent climate research, and is now taken as a given. This is regardless of the fact that global temperatures have not risen anywhere close to RCP 8.5 projections since it was released. Facts don't always matter, because it has become so agenda-driven and politicized.

So all of this is to say, these flood maps are likely overdone a little. That doesn't mean they are useless, just overdone on flood extent.

Lee

bower · #5

Thanks Lee!

It's nice to have someone with expertise onboard.
I noticed on their research page, they have a list of academic partners who are testing the data in various ways, so for sure it is a work in progress (like any weather forecast, no doubt about that!).
Rajun also mentioned he checked his area and they were not correct about the flooding he experienced.

So it's probably not much use at this stage, doesn't look like it is really ready for 2020.
Too bad! because the graphical part works great. I'd love to have something like this for my area.
One thing I really liked, is that the time scale is very immediate - 5 10 15 years. So if it's really out of wack you don't have to wait forever to see the correction come due.