Danish Nation-wide Sea-level Rise Flooding Tool

At a flooding conference in the Danish Parliament on 3rd February 2012, the Danish Minister for the Environment launched a nation-wide on-line interactive tool mapping the risk of flooding in Denmark due to rising sea-levels. It is made possible by a computation performed by SCALGO on a very accurate 1.6 metre 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 tool visualises the flooded area for a (user-) given sea-level rise, and is part of the national climate change adaptation portal available to government specialist, as well as citizens.

 

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. Apart from a module for the sea-level rise flood mapping, the package also includes modules for computing flow accumulation, watersheds, and bluespots (maximal depressions).