Iowa 500-year Flood Plain Model
June 26th, 2008by Bill Greer
Came across a great data set on Finder! (thanks Laurie) yesterday that shows how bringing the worlds of GIS and the GeoWeb together can be insanely useful. This dataset shows the 500-year flood plain for Johnson County, Iowa. This includes Iowa City. Making highly detailed and technical data easy for people to consume could potentially save lives. If you’d like to check out the Data you can grab it HERE . Download it in Google Earth, ESRI, or as a CSV. I’ve added a few screen shots from Google Earth so you know what you’re getting.
In this picture you can see that the flood level would have a serious impact on the Airport.
This picture puts a lot into perspective, Front and center in the image there is a running track, and what looks like 4 baseball fields.
Here is another example to show the extent flood plain.
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June 26th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
During the recent event, the airport did flood a bit on the east end (no runways were inundated as far as I know) and the road going along the east end of the airport was closed due to water over it. The area with the four ball fields is called the “Coralville strip,” and it was severely impacted with many businesses along there having 4+ feet of water in them. My guess is that the flood was a 333 year event
June 27th, 2008 at 7:25 am
The only problem I have with how this looks right now, is that it lacks useful information. Showing a “Blue colored floodplain” tells you very little. What people want to know is at what LEVEL are they needed to be worried they are in the flood plain. Because if the water is only coming up 3 feet.. I could care less if I live at 7 feet above that.
I would not be using the KML for any serious planning. I am willing to bet there is a ton more information in the shapefile what will make for a better and more useful visualization than this current KML.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Chad,
I think you’re probably correct that there is better information out there with better attributes. This data set is a step in the right direction, and I believe it does provide some very useful information, and GeoCommons provides a fast and simple way to provide that information to the community where it could make a difference. If you know of a better data set that would be more useful to the Iowa Community affected by the floods, I would invite you to upload it to Finder! and I would be more than happy to highlight your data on our blog.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Well, I thought it would be the shapefile.. but no, that is as generic as the kml. So, to get more information of use.. I would combine this with a topo map and create different colored layers for every 2 feet or so above flood stage.
But this is useful in that you can see the flood plain as a whole though.