Denmark: Danish Minister for the Environment launched a new nation-wide online interactive tool that maps the risk of flooding in Denmark due to rising sea-levels. The tool visualises flooded area for a (user-) given sea-level rise, and is part of the national climate change adaptation portal (klimatilpasning.dk/en-us) available to government specialist, as well as ordinary citizens.
According to a press statement by SCALGO, a terrain data-processing technology provider; the tool could be made possible by a computation performed by SCALGO on a very accurate 1.6 meter resolution raster terrain model for the entire country of Denmark. The detailed and thus massive model contains more than 20 billion cells. It was vital for the accuracy of the sea-level rise flooding tool that such a high quality model was used, since it ensured that dikes and other important features with small spatial extent were taken into account.
The SCALGO technology for processing massive terrain data on normal desktop computers was essential for the computation behind the sea-level rise flooding tool. Using the SCALGO Hydrology software package the computation can be performed on the entire model of Denmark (without thinning or tiling) in approximately a day and a half on a normal desktop computer with 4GB of main memory. The mapping shows how much rain has to fall before any given cell of a detailed raster terrain is below water and thus it also shows what part of the terrain is below water after a given amount of rain.
Source: SCALGO
