Danish government launches nation-wide sea-level rise flooding tool based on SCALGO computations

A press release from the company, but still, it's worth a look: At a flooding conference in the Danish Parliament on February 3 the 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 visualizes the 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. It is 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. 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). SCALGO also offers more advanced hydrological analysis computation services using in-house software, including the SCALGO Flash Flood Mapping product, which estimates the risk of flooding during extreme rain events. 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.

Information about SCALGO technology, products and services can be found at http://scalgo.com.

The effect of a 2-meter sea-level rise on the island Mandø using 90 meter resolution SRTM data (left) and 2 meter resolution COWI data (right). The result on the detailed data, processed using SCALGO software, correctly shows that a 5 meter tall perimeter dike protects the island from flooding. Imagery ©2009 DigitalGlobe, Scankort, GeoEye, COWI A/S, DDO