Wondering what the map of Britain, Europe, the rest of the world will look like when the icecaps melt? Don't worry, there is (inevitably) a Google Maps page that shows how the coastline will look at various sea-level rises. Try it out at Alex Tingle's Flood Maps page (suitable background music: Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes The Flood". Here's the MIDI file. Here's the lyrics. Now go find your house).
A couple of things to consider, given Guardian Technology's Free Our Data campaign:
- the elevation data comes from Nasa - not a British organisation last time we looked. Why do they have better publicly availabile data for UK elevation information for floods that anyone can use than any British organisation? We did write about the Norwich Union flood map by postcode system - but that's not publicly available.
- isn't someone at the Met Office or its Hadley Weather Centre or the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting working on something similar, and if so, why isn't their work publicly available? This is quite rough-and-ready, but we'd all like to know how things could pan out with sea level rises in the next 50 years.
- Google maps. They may be OS data (would anyone at Google care to confirm?), but wouldn't it be nice if it was a British company taking advantage of free data to build a map, rather than a US-stock-market-enriched company?
Alex, who lives in Harrow, does admit that the data aren't perfect:
I myself have a concern about the accuracy of the data. If you look at central London, you'll see that it doesn't flood, even at +14m. I think that might be caused by NASA's measurements being skewed by the heights of the building.
