Slashgeo

EO Portal has an article about Envisat monitoring China's largest lake and rivers flooding. From the article: "Flooding is classed as the world's most costly type of natural disaster. As part of Dragon, Envisat ASAR and MERIS images have also been acquired and processed in near-real time for mapping of flood events and as inputs for flood risk management."

Vector One shares a link to the Dartmouth Global Archive Map of Extreme Flood Events since 1985. From Vector One: "Indivudal years may be displayed. It is interesting to note that floods have occurred just about everywhere on the planet."

All Points Blog links to a short article on the requirement of higher resolution DEMs in the U.S., specifically for flood mapping. From the article: "Maps being used to calculate flood danger in the United States rely on data that are decades out of date, according to a report that calls for a new national program to remap land levels. The National Research Council yesterday proposed an "Elevation for the Nation" program to produce up-to-date data."

There's two simultaneous entries about modeling sea level change by Digital Geography, one with NASA World Wind and the other using Google Earth. From the NWW post: "I was interested in testing the Global Flood plugin for World Wind and am pleased to say that it worked very well, though not at the zoom level required for the lesson I describe here. [...] However, if the object of the lesson is to look at the impacts of sea level change on a regional scale, then World Wind is an improvement on the Google Earth technique, and the level of flooding can be controlled by a simple slider."

Last weekend was the first OpenStreetMap conference called The State of the Map. OMS has been mentioned quite a few times before. The opening keynote was given by Google's Ed Parsons which shares his slides. You can read comments from Dan Karran, high earth orbit, Maemo and Brain Off blog. From this last link: "We’re nearing consensus in the nature of the challenges facing OpenStreetMap as it’s growing, the approaches to take, and bit by bit heading towards solutions. Even the extremely contentious legal debate is moving towards actions — drawing up a concise list of questions for presentation to a (paid for) lawyer. The foundation is starting to get more financially comfortable, so there’s also money for servers and a recognized conduit for donations."

An online, user-friendly map that tracks flood conditions has been developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

As expected rains drive flood waters higher along the Mississippi River Valley, USGS crews are in the field collecting data needed to update the flood maps, prepare forecasts, manage the flood and warn communities.

This new system is part of the USGS WaterWatch suite of web-based streamflow products and can be accessed at the Map of flood and high flow conditions Web site.

Read the entire story at www.geocomm.com.