Fl00dhack

Flooding simulator made for HackRPI.

Overview: This project allows users to simulate the extent of flooding for an area. We were inspired by similar technologies such as floodmap.net, which simulates sea level rise. However, floodmap.net is limited primarily to coastal flooding situations, as its technology is not designed for more inland areas such as lakes and rivers. Fl00dhack solves this challenge by allowing us to simulate flooding above any arbitrary point that the user can easily select, allowing individuals and organizations to see how at-risk their area is for a flood of a given height above normal.

Technologies: We constructed this as a webapp for easy accessibility. We use OpenStreetMap and LeafletJS for front-end rendering and user interface and the Google Maps elevation API for topographic data. In addition, we make use of JQuery to simplify the javascript code.

Difficulties: Our greatest challenge was locating good topographic data. Initially, we were attempting to use OpenTopography to access topographic data, but it turned out that their website was not suited to handling automatic POST requests. Instead, we chose Google Maps for its accurate elevation API.

What's next:

Optimize our data retrieval to decrease load times
Use predicted flood map to estimate damages and population displacement for a given flood
Get forecasts for rivers near the selected location

Contributors:

Alden Ford

Zachary McDaniel

Matthew Cirimele

Kevin Liu

Built With

Submitted to

HackRPI 2019
- Winner Wolfram Award

Created by

I came up with the idea for a map that predicted the extent of floods given a water depth above normal at a given location and guided development to ensure that our final product matched our original idea. In addition, I developed the JS flood fill algorithm that allows us to figure out which areas would likely flood given elevation data and integrated the algorithm into our technology stack.

Alden Ford
I worked on front and back end. I helped design the look of the web page, and also helped with some helper functions to manipulate data. These included parsing data into readable blocks and finding the bounds for the latitude and longitude which was then used to create a grid. I had not used a whole lot of Javascript prior to this, so I defintely learned a lot of skills with this that I didn't know previously.

Zachary McDaniel
My main contribution was the collection, management, and formatting of the huge sums of data required to get the elevation data needed. I used the Google Elevation API to create a grid pairing the latitude and longitude of a point with its height above sea level, which was then used to create the grid for the flood map function. I wrote all of this in JQuery and JavaScript, and wrote many test functions in HTML

Matthew Cirimele
My main contributions were assisting with the design of the website and utilizing the leaflet.js library to make the map properly return the user's input for latitude and longitude. I am credited for the background, description, and most of the formatting for the website I made on Codepen using HTML, CSS, and JS. Also, the functional map which was the basis of this entire project, as well as the programming of the marker and displaying the latitude and longitude of the user input, are all things I take credit for.

Kevin Liu

Updates

Alden Ford started this project — Nov 03, 2019 10:26 AM EST

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