Comments on: High-Resolution Sea Level Rise Effects In Google Earth

By: Leszek Pawlowicz

Leszek Pawlowicz — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:04:01 +0000

A reasonable point – I’ve added a short note to the post referring to this (and also pointing out that since writing the post, the elevation data for the US in Google Earth has been upgraded to 10m accuracy).

By: Lars

Lars — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:21:23 +0000

Unfortunately this approach is limited to the coverage of the USGS Seamless Server, which is basically the U.S… right? So for the rest of the world, this approach offers no improvement over the Flood Maps web site or Zoltan’s animation?

If so, you might want to mention that limitation prominently. It’s a critical limitation for most of the world, and it’s not obvious from your post.

Lars

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:21:29 +0000

How cool it would be to see new york become a kind of venice. yellow cab would have to purchase a fleet of boats.

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 17 May 2007 18:40:26 +0000

I made a World Wind plugin that does this:

http://forum.worldwindcentral.com/showthread.php?t=8592

It’s more suited for medium-scale changes though, the detail is limited by the precision of the rendering. This means you get z-ordering artifacts in places where a terrain triangle is nearly the same location as the flood mesh.

By: Leszek Pawlowicz

Leszek Pawlowicz — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:26:48 +0000

I was about to agree with you, when I remembered that I had seen extruded polygons that I thought did follow the earth's curvature. Created an extruded polygon of Brazil with Shape2Earth to check that out, and it does indeed follow the earth's curvature when the elevation mode is set to absolute. You can download that KMZ file here. Oddly enough, it seems to follow the topography of Brazil to a certain degree, which it shouldn't if it's in "absolute mode", but that didn't seem to be a problem with the flooding KML file I created for New York City.

By: m_k

m_k — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:26:56 +0000

Impressive! (both your work and the effect :)
But the described method has one limitation: it won’t work for large areas (larger than few sq km) if you use extruded polygons – in GE they (their ‘roofs’) don’t follow the Earth curvature.