Drowning Charleston
You probably have heard of climate change and the very real possibility of sea level rise increasing in the next few decades. Since most populated cities around the world are located in coastal areas, scientist have been modeling sea level rise to calculate how much flooding will affect our population. For example, check out the work done by Climate Central showing sea level rise in the Charleston Area in this website: http://ss2.climatecentral.org/#11/32.7746/-79.8871?show=satellite&projections=1-RCP85-SLR&level=5&unit=feet&pois=hide
Change the water level bar to see which areas are getting more affected when you increase this number.
Sea level rise gets calculated based on the elevation of an area over sea level. If an area is only 4 feet above sea level, and the expected sea level rise in 10 years is of 5 feet, then that area will be possibly covered by water in 10 years (unless human intervention occurs).
We can do our own manually interventions of sea level rise using Google Earth. Andrew David Thaler, a deep-sea biologist has created this easy and at the same time, very powerful way of calculating and displaying approximate sea level rise using the Overlay tool in Google Earth. We will use his methodology to explore the consequences of sea level rise in San Francisco.
Make a blue square
Open the program Paint (Start - Programs - Accessories - Paint). Draw a perfect blue square with no borders and save it as a .jpg. If you prefer, save this square that I created for this exercise (bottom of the page).
Create an image overlay
Google Earth allows you to bring your own image and locate it and re-size it to the area that corresponds to.
In this case, we are going to add our blue square to the entire earth.
To add an image overlay, go to the upper bar and click the Add Image Overlay button. In the new window that appears, do the following:
- Name: Sea Level Rise 3m
- Link: Browse to the location where you saved the blue square on your previous step (Desktop)
You will have two identical overlays of 3m. Change the second one to the following:
- Name: Sea Level Rise 5m
- Altitude: 5m
Compare the difference between one and the other. Do you see an increase in the area being affected?
Remove the Sea Level Rise 3m
layer and zoom out to the beach Area and see the extent of the possible impact. Overlay the school layer (check the box next to the folder in the Places box). How many schools will be affected? How about parks?
Zoom into the Charleston Riverdogs area and use the navigation controls to face the city, focus your view on Market Street.
When you are satisfied on your view, take a snapshot by clicking the Save Image button on the top toolbar.
Your file should look similar to the image below:
- Location: click the Location tab and set up the latitude and longitude coordinates so the square wraps around the entire world. Type the following numbers on each box:
- North: 90
- South: -90
- East: 180
- West: -180
Your settings in your screen should look very similar to the image on the right.
- Altitude: Click on the altitude tab.
- Set the drop down list from Clamped to the ground to Absolute and
- In the box to the left, enter your desired height of sea level rise: 5m.
Click OK to save your settings. Zoom into the Folly Beach area in Charleston to see how much this area gets affected.
In the Places box, copy your image overlay, Sea Level Rise 3m (right-click - Copy) and paste it (right-click - Paste).
- Transparency: use the slider until you can see through the layer, so you can see beneath your simulated sea level rise.
Recording a Google Earth Tour
In this last step, we want to record a tour that will take us from Folly Beach to Charleston Riverdogs and to the Arthur Ravenel Bridge. We will be recording before and after effects of sea level rise by 3m.
Make sure you have the layers for placemarks turned on and rest of them should be turned off which is a polygon and a path layer. Zoom out to the level where you can see the globe.
Now Click on the Record Tour button on the top menu.
Then Click on the Record Button.
- Double click on your first placemark which is Arthur Ravenel Bridge to zoom into that one. Then turn on Sea level Rise 3m layer.
- Turn off the Sea level Rise layer.
- Then, double click on your second placemark which is for Charleston Riverdogs to zoom into it.
- Then turn on Sea level Rise 3m layer.
- Turn off the Sea level Rise layer.
- Then, double click on your third placemark which is for Folly Beach to zoom into it.
- Then turn on Sea level Rise 3m layer.
Then Click on the Record Button again to stop it.
You will see a new window popup asking you to save that. Click on Save Button to name it as : Mygoogleearthtour
Click on the Tools option at the menu bar then click on Movie Maker.
Choose the following options for the new window:
- Supported Compression Formats: WMV9
- Record from: A saved tour and the choose you tour
- Save to: Click Browse and save to the D:/ Drive under your folder and name it as mygoogleearthtour
- Resolution: 1280x720 (HD)
- FIPS: 20
- Turn on the Advanced check box and choose Record to WMV format.
- Click Create Movie
Then let it run and when asked to watch the video you recorded, say Yes.
