Senegal delta sea level rise map

Five friends at Arts & Metiers engineering school in Paris took a ten month leave to sail around the North Atlantic: Lez'Arts Marins (here) sail south from Britanny past the Azores & Madeira to Senegal for a moth humanitarian aid project, west across to Martinique and northeast N of Scotland to Scandinavia and back.

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Here is their current location S of Dakar Peninsula at center top, in the Saloum Delta at center. The intricate coastline hints at a complex river delta coastal environment. Former colleagues talked about such environs up&down the W Africa coast: shifting sand bars, mangrove forests and complex risk of flooding from river and from sea; these prove challenging to map as they shift constantly and can prove difficult for navigation.

None of that happened however to this team, who enjoyed clear, sunny and hot weather and clear waters to head up the Saloum River near Foundiougne and carry out their project as landlubbers for a month. Let's hope they don't lose their sea legs 😆 They share their enthusiasm and joie-de-vivre on an open WhatsApp Group here... a welcome contradiction to social media fatigue!

My interest is risk of flooding from river and from sea I had mapped extensively in East Anglia in this blog (here). Let me show how easy it is to create a map form open data on global sea level rise via web mapping. While overlays were created on the desktop, NOAA data is available for free here via free account here. See an example here & go here for full DIY map instructions.

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The legend indicates not only the sea level rise modelled for indicated elevations, but also time estimates from various sources and explanations here. Note that this is a straight geometric model, mapping sea level elevation against topography, with no detailed environmental interactions like water absorption, subsidence (sinking of land) or flooding effects (backgrounder here).

From dark to light blue are immediate to far-reaching extent of the encroachment. You can see it is extensive and will displace a significant amount of population: this was highlighted by Climate Central here; note that their alarmism reflects costal inundation concerns for local guv and insurance.