Low tech / high tech map updates

At last summer Street for Life (S4L) amd Cottemnham Beach Party events by Extinction Rebellion (XR) Cambridge, a simple sea level rise map was a hit with children and adults alike: I simply stuck on cardboard backing an Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 Explorer map of Cambridge on side, and villages immediately north on the other. The +5 and +15 m. sea level rises (SLR) from the 2006 firetreemap  were hand-drawn, but eyeballing it made it pretty inaccurate... and +15 and +5 m. were picked because they overlapped Cambridge and villages north, rather than anything scientific!

Cottenham Beach Party

Having done a 360 view on sea level rise, temperature, time and affected areas, agglomerations and populations, was it not time to update that map? Also having posted some high-contrast  web maps in my last blog post, I thought that I could trace the colour boundaries onto the same papers maps... by simply projecting the web map onto the paper map! Below you see from bottom left to top right the projector, the laptop with the web map, the paper map against the wall and the projected map on top. Thanks Jesus Lane Meeting House Wardens for the use of space and projector:

click to enlarge

So we went from this GIS map:

...to this paper map north of Cambridge:

OS Custom Made immediately north of #309 

...and this one of Cambridge itself:

Cambridge OS Explorer map #209

The black lines are the original eye-balled 5 and 15 m. levels, and in RGB are those respectively for 6, 2 and 0 m. from the previous blog post.

BSL on the middle map means:below sea level - whilst it remains dry due to constant drainage of the Fens, it's an invisible barrier to travel E-W among villages immediately north of the city -  one must travle south to the A14 trunk road at the common border of both maps, or north via Soham at very top of the top map.

A question that came up repeatedly at both events, was "OK, so when is this going to happen?". We now we have better timing constraints on the sea level rise models:

Voila! A cool mix of old and new... A refurbished map ready to help explain Fenlands inundation in the context of the current Climate Change among localised efforts to raise our awareness. Let me close with a lighthearted closing slide to a local village event:

(click to enlarge)

Listen to the scientists

[Update: East Anglia Fenlands + London Thames Valley inundation models now on YouTube!]

This is what happened at the first Extinction Rebellion Cambridge working group of concerned  scientists, on the topic of sea level rise (SLR) among many others discussed then. As posted earlier here, the scientific consensus lies at 0.5 and 2 m. SLR by mid- and end-century in moderate emissions and far-tail scenarios, respectively. That meeting reiterated, however, the importance of an extreme scenario, ~ 6 m. SLR from the melting of various ice sheets: 7 m. is in fact the default SLR setting for the original sea level rise map, flood.firetree.net:

Climate Emergency maps as easy as 1-2-3

Almost 2½ years ago I blogged then presented Emergency response maps as easy as 1-2-3 - in fact that helped spur on my current venture described in previous posts - and now apply the same to do inundation maps from sea level rise as well as river run-off.

Areas affected by sea level rise scenarios

Local Community Engagement 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12

So far we've looked at sea level rise, timing, temperature regime and risk of flooding from land and from sea. These scenarios were developed using open data from Ordnance Survey and Climate Central for elevation models, UK Met Office for temperature and DEFRA for flooding. This was also put in a time and IPCC scenario context from scientific publications.

The second most important thing  for East Anglia Fenlands residents after the timing of such scenarios, is the actual areas affected by them. Having collected all the underpinning information, it was a matter of overlaying climate data with settlement data: infrastructure was posted in Part 2  from OS Open Zoomstack, and settlements were posted in Part 6 as a local Wikimedia gazetteer.