Leveraging your GIS as a Collaborative Platform

New Mapping Tool and Techniques for Visualizing Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts

—Douglas Marcy, NOAA Coastal Services Center

It is one thing to have a discussion or write about a one or two foot rise in the ocean surface and potential impacts to a local community, it is another to show someone a map, highlighting the areas that will potentially be impacted.

The ability to visualize the potential height and inland extent of water gives us a better understanding of the corresponding impacts and consequences. Mapping sea level changes in a GIS gives the user the ability to overlay the potentially impacted areas with other data such as critical infrastructure, roads, ecologically sensitive areas, demographics, and economics. Providing maps on the web via internet mapping technologies enables the user to have an interactive experience that truly brings out the "visual" part of the map definition.

Over the past several years the lessons learned from investigating pilot sea level change mapping applications, have led to the development of a next generation sea level rise and coastal flooding viewer. In addition new mapping techniques have been developed to use high resolution data sources to show flooding impacts on local public infrastructure, mapping confidence, flooding frequency, marsh impacts, and social and economic impacts from potential inundation. This paper will provide a brief history of previous sea level change visualization pilots, detailed discussion of new methods, current status of new tool development and outputs, and future plans for expanding to the rest of the U.S.