Project Details

The Challenge | Rising Water

Sea levels are rising around the world, and approximately 40% of the human population lives in coastal zones. Your challenge is to help communicate the impacts of rising oceans by creating a visualization tool that illustrates the changes caused by rising sea levels in your region.

FLOOD

User friendly visualization tool aimed to educate people about the risks of rising oceans via a mobile app and a web application.

Aqua gang

Our team designed the user interface of a mobile app and implemented a functioning web application, transforming NASA data sets from raw numbers into easy-to-understand visuals projected onto a map.

We focused on trying to show in the most direct way possible how the rising level of the oceans would affect our region, Toscana, by plotting both land elevation and population density data: that way, we make it possible to visualize simultaneously the critical areas and the number of people at risk.

About the concept of our mobile app, all the informations are shown through animations and interactive elements, laid as a filter over the camera screen.

The images shown by the application depend on variables set through sliders by the user, and informations given by GPS and NASA data (the user’s position in space and in relation to the sea level).

The variables we chose to use in order to keep both the applications interactive are:

  • the amount of time passed, in years;
  • the severity of the change in comparison to the actual predictions we have.

In order to achieve our results, we worked together using GitHub and developed our project with Google Maps APIs, html, CSS, JavaScript, Python, C, C++.

Most of the artwork was designed by ourselves with the help of FireAlpaca and GIMP.


Used Data:

  • Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) dataset, generated from the Integrated Multi-Mission Ocean Altimeter Data for Climate Research;
  • Shuttle Radar Topography Mission land elevation data;
  • Population Density, v4.11, 2015 dataset, from the Socioeconomic Data and Application Center (SEDAC).

Our code: https://github.com/mirko-laruina/SpaceApp/

Screencap of our application: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pRzolG5xdRS_-rZv...

Our presentation: https://drive.google.com/open?id=146cMl1cY4P5_sLmO...