This is episode 747 of A Very Spatial Podcast, September 29th, 2024. Hello and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast. I'm Jesse. I'm Sue. I'm Barb. And this is Frank. And this week, we are going to talk about something we don't know yet. Is the topic bar still? I have an idea that relates to the first topic, the first news item. Oh, nice. Okay. Well, so first up. First up in the news the very popular real estate website, online website, on the website. Sorry, I started again.
First up in the news the very popular real estate website Zillow has announced that they're actually going to be bringing climate risk information to their listings. So they're going to be partnering with First Street. So that's someone who does climate risk financial modeling and they're planning to roll out the climate data this year. So we're already well into the year, but this year to the website. Version and also the iOS app and then Android early in the next year.
So they're actually going to have, I think, five risk categories related to climate. And so it'll be a way to see, you know, maybe there's some risks. Maybe for example, if you live in a, are going to live in a flood zone, you might need extra insurance those types of things. So a recognition of these kinds of impacts and home buying is often the biggest, the biggest financial investment people make in their lives.
So. It is really important to kind of know what you're getting into and where to go along with Zillow's move into this risk area, just kind of tying into that, make this one big conversation about it. In the U. S., the interagency Sea level group has the specifically U. S. interagency. Task force on sea level change, because, you know, we, we are bringing everything back from the 80s. So why not task force as well?
But they have pushed out data for sea level rise in the United States so that everybody can look at it. And it's not like this isn't the first one, like Sue mentioned earlier today not on Mike. But you know, there've been other organizations that have been providing data about sea level, but now. We have this interagency group that's bringing all the different resources together, as opposed to having ones that might have been presented a little bit differently, so that it looked contradictory.
Now it's unified. Everybody's putting information out there in a systematic way. I'm a little bit annoyed that it's in feet. That's me as a metric person. I prefer it to be in centimeters, but that's okay. And it's on a website called USC Level Change, so a new website that has debuted, and so you can check out the, the link in the show notes and head over there and there's a, a National Sea Level Explorer. Huh? Specifically, it's sealevel. globalchange. gov.
If you're going to give a URL, give the actual. Well, I was given the title. There you go. And the URL. So anyway, if you want to check it out and check it out. Again, a lot of, a lot of good science behind all of the agencies that work in this.
I especially use NOAA's Digital Coast resources a lot where we're located and when we give our students exercises about coastal chains here in South Carolina, in the Lowcountry especially have utilized Digital Coast's sea level and all kinds of resources, but there's lots of them and it's great to see it in an integrated location like the sea level change website and, you know, don't Sue's kind of pointing out that we have access to digital coast because we're, you know, a hundred miles away
from that office in Charleston. It is digital coast for the entire country, including lakes and those types of things. So there's, you know, what, if it's digital coast, it's anything that's where you have that interface land. Yeah. Even the Great Lakes. So if you never checked out their site if you just Google digital coast, you'll find it. Just. Lots and lots of resources, everything from LIDAR to I think they do reports on economic impacts, all kinds of things. It's pretty cool.
Related to all this is the fact that the geospatial analytics market is growing. It is expected to grow by almost 30 35 billion by 2032. A lot of this powered by the things we've been talking about, just a whole lot of spatial data out there sensors, artificial intelligence, machine learning that has made these geospatial analysis. More approachable and accessible especially through a lot of federal government agencies that are producing and putting out this data for everyone to use.
And I think too, you know, increasingly, right, as, as we've seen all through the last couple decades in development of geospatial as an industry and community, it's the awareness of, oh, not only do we now know this stuff exists, but how to use it. And that's kind of increasingly, I think, driving it as well. So that was put out by future market insights, which this is relevant to me in that one of the things that I do at my new position, well, I've been there for almost two years now.
So newish position is that we do a lot of review of programs in the in academic sense, are they doing what they need to do or the meeting needs? And one of the things that we're, we have to ask and answer is, is there a demand for this major, this degree in some form or fashion, and that's interesting to me that we have these independent reports. Mostly private sector, but independent reports doing this.
But a lot of the things that we use for program review purposes is related to I was Bureau of Labor Statistics. I always confuse that with BLM the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States, which indicates what the Bureau sort of independently comes up with an analysis. Now, the tricky bit is, is how they relate to, I don't wanna say niche because that's not fair, but. Smaller subsects, subset sets of labors, labor landscape, it often gets hidden.
So I think it's really important to have these sort of auxiliary data sets to tap into for these sort of analyses to say, look, there's a demand for this work and people need to get exposed to it. Even if they're not necessarily going to be doing this all day, every day, as part of the job. My comment on this is yes, I did put one of these in. Show notes like, I don't know, maybe a quarter ago, but it shows you that they're just churning out these reports to to highlight these things.
And there is a financial, you know, boom in its own way going on with these technologies is the issue, of course, is it's not necessarily something we see on the applications and it's more on the location based services end. A lot of times, but you know, there's tons of people who are getting contracted for, for applications as well. It's just, I think whenever these groups focus on things, they're more about, okay, who can you buy type of things for other companies.
And sometimes I think they're a little optimistic, bullish, but, but I mean, I don't know, like, right. Unless you go back and say, well, we predicted X. X growth in this year, and this is what it actually was. I mean, and I think part of it is the reuse of terms like was a geospatial analytics, which I think they really mean in the very broad sense. But we do have job titles in many places that have geospatial analyst as a job title. And I think that you could reasonably go analytics analyst.
Okay, that clearly goes together, but they're. Meeting this much more broadly to talk about applications, but also data holdings and all sorts of things that are not what we think of as a geospatial analyst job. And to kind of go along with this with INTERGEO, I can't remember if it's just finished or, or still going on for a couple more days.
But the, the annual conference in Germany this year, and, you know, to be fair, most years you see this, cause most people, Most organizations wait until EnergyO to do their big reveals, but, you know, there's just been a deluge of new sensors, GNSS capabilities, you know, some of them are focusing on the newer GNSS like Bidao and Galileo, but yeah, there's just a lot of things that are coming out.
A lot, of course, are we're seeing I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd call it miniaturization, but you know, the reduce of size of some of these sensors so that they're you know, fixable to drones whether they be fixed wing or, or rotocopter type of drones we're seeing a lot more focus of sensors for that portion of the market to use terms from the last item. Okay. And that's it for the news.
This week's topic I'm springing on two of my co hosts which is When you listen to this, there'll be a little bit historical, but it's a very topical topic, if you will given the hurricane that just went through Western North Carolina.
And I wanted to talk a little about a little bit about flooding and flood data and emergency management and all that kind of associated stuff, primarily in the United States, though, I'm sure we can talk a little bit about it in the context of outside the United States. My expertise does, does not go beyond the United States.
Our national borders, but I think that, you know, the devastation that's going on in Western North Carolina right now and somewhat into Tennessee and other places is a good time to pause and think about the way we think about floods and flooding the national insurance national flood insurance program, I always get the acronym something along what flood planes mean and what they depict all these sort of things. Topics just at the, you know, very, very broad level.
I mean, you can't keep them straight as a, as an acronym. No, I, and I, I always, I always have to go national flood insurance and FIP to actually say out the words rather than the, the, the particular you know, acronym.
So just to define terms for our non us listeners their FEMA is a flood emergency management association agency, federal, federal emergency management Agency yes, I think, and there are federal government agency that's designed to respond to emergencies natural emergencies, primarily so floods and hurricanes being big ones that happen United States, particularly the eastern part of the United States, but also, you know, her tornadoes or, or, you know, bad snow storms, anything like that.
Earthquakes, wildfires, earthquakes. Yeah, you name it. Yeah, and so what they do is they, they provide kind of, in my opinion, I'm going to typify this as three kinds of, or types of outputs. One is responding to the emergency. Something happens. We need to get boots on the ground, you know, get these people food. Water, shelter, protection, response and related to that is after that immediate emergency is kind of resolved itself to a point. It's how do we rebuild these, these communities?
And what do we do to go about doing it? The 2nd piece that I think that they do that's important that a lot of people don't realize is they do a whole heck of a lot of data development. So they're doing. A lot of planning on the back end, and that's probably the third thing. The second one is the rebuilding one, but that's near there.
The the, they do a lot of data development on the back end to kind of help predict where this is going to happen, where this stuff is going to take place or likely to take place. The probability that it'll take place. How do we do put things in place to mitigate that? before it happens. And related to that is the National Flood Insurance Program, you know, things like that to say, okay, well, what do we do to make sure that you're protected?
And then if something happens that, you know, you don't end up getting in a recurring event where, you know, every so often this keeps happening to you. And we have to keep rebuilding. So that's kind of broadly what FEMA does. And I'm sure there's a dozen other minor things that I'm not in that, Net list, but that's more or less it. So you know, the big thing that of course is, is in the news, literally right now, as we record, this is the, is flood and flooding.
And one of the things that FEMA does is they create these flood plane maps to indicate what areas are likely to flood. And it's a very complicated process to generate these maps. And a conversation as well. It's not, there's, there's a lot of science that goes into it, but then there's also feedback from the public on those products. And this is the D firm that we're talking about right now. Yeah. Okay. The previous set was, oh, it started with a Q. What was it called? I'm not going to remember.
Let's keep moving either. Yeah. And, and, but the idea behind this is we have these these popularly speaking, they're called floodplains. I mean, you know, we call them the cube, whatever the heck it is, because neither Jesse and I can remember. And we also call them D firms and those are the technical terms.
But, and there's a lot of science, like Jesse said, that goes into this, that says, okay, based upon elevation and based upon a certain expectation of rainfall or water You know, hitting that area within a wide amount of time, what area do we think is going to be flooded? That's overly simplistic, but it gives you an idea of what they're using to try to figure out what that looks like.
Now, the thing I think that's really controversial is I've seen and heard and had family members use the term floodplain a lot in the last 72 to 96 hours or so but I don't think that the public has really got the idea of the 100 year, 500 year, 1000 year flood event and the floodplains that are embodied in there. So, I want to talk a little bit about just kick that around a little bit and say, is there a naming problem we got going on here? Is there something we could do different?
Well, I think to start with the, I think you're right. The term floodplain suggests something that that's where the water is going to go, but water is going to go where water is going to go. Especially whenever there's that much of it. And so I think that, you know, that just the lack of understanding that you may not live in a quote unquote floodplain, but it doesn't mean that water is not going to go there.
Now, of course, given the fact that we're in the mountains, water is going to tend to go to those areas, but it doesn't mean that away from the creeks away from the rivers you're not going to see an impact. So, you know, I went to school at Appalachian state. It flooded the city, flood town flooded. Multiple times while I was there due to a combination of either snow melt or tropical systems coming through and the places that flooded weren't always the places that were near water.
So, yeah, this idea that the places that are going to get damaged are next to the water is is a question mark in and of itself. Yeah, and under in an understanding of what processes are trying to be modeled to assess risk, right? You're you're absolutely true. And and again and in this event alone We also had the onshore impacts in Florida.
I mean huge devastation there and some of that is flooding and then standing water as well, but but but yeah, so the processes that create the The types of floods that, you know, we're seeing now and have seen in events may not be embodied in how we go about saying the, you know, 100, 500, and, and even knowing those numbers, as you say, Frank, you're absolutely right that it's not understood what that means from a statistical standpoint and You
know, when you look at maps and, and also a lot of the, the, the data that's out there is not necessarily looked at specifically unless a particular, you know, set of homeowners suddenly finds themselves in a floodplain and potentially will activate their inclusion in the National Flood Insurance Program. So it's in general. Not that much awareness or what it would even mean to prepare.
And I think that given that this is an ongoing emergency we don't know yet for a lot of people in this, you have direct contact, you know, where you caught off guard. Did you not think that, that this was, you know, like what those types of circumstances are, but that these types of events that happen quickly certainly are very difficult to prepare for. Because of the time frame. Now, now there was forecasting for this potential. But, but that's also, that's also different, right?
How do you prepare? How do you, how do you model and understand an event that may be a quick moving event versus the type of flooding that is often depicted in the FEMA maps and things, which is more traditional kind of thought, you know, the rivers get full and they rise kind of thing. Well, yeah, and added to this is the uncertainty what you're talking about.
Sue of landslides and, you know, capturing the landslides and landslide events that are happening which, you know, go along with a lot of when you have these types of hazards that are happening which are its own set of problems. And very difficult to, to map without the public or other people out there. I know Eurysa's photo mappers are out there taking photos and documenting things to help get some of this into the response that's going on.
So we haven't said it and but we have before in episodes that whenever we're talking about a 100 year floodplain, we're talking about a 1 percent chance for that area to be flooded every year. Not once in a hundred years, but every year.
Well, not only one, not only that it actually is technically every time it rains Yeah, so, you know, it rains a lot not just once so, you know, it's every time it rains There's a 1 percent chance that could be a 100 year floodplain event and then 500 is a point 0. 2 percent chance and so, you know We're talking about statistically very unlikely events, but they are events that can happen. And so a thing here, I think that, you know, we're focusing on what happened from Helene.
These places had already seen, essentially, a Low average chance rain event that came in before Helene. So there was flooding before Helene's dropped it's X number of inches of rain on top of that. So you're stacking these things. Yeah. So it's just, it's a massive amount of water. They were already dealing with before.
This massive amount of water came in and there's another dimension to this that a lot of times people just forget is some of the, some of the historical knowledge basically, right? Is, for example, Patterson drive in Morgantown, West Virginia floods a lot more. Then other areas around there. Okay. And you can look at that and you can say, well, why is that happening? A lot more is it over top of a creek? There used to be a creek there and we built over it. The creek still there.
It's just the land is over top of it. So when we talk about, you know, flood coming from a rain coming from the sky, water coming from the sky, we go, yeah, I get that. And I go, I understand what the river is and I understand where that is. It's over here. So I don't really understand how filling that thing up is going to affect me over way over here. Well, okay. There's a nonzero amount of water. That's going to go where water goes.
Just like Jesse said, that you're not seeing that's underground. That's got some sort of inlet from someplace that's being fed from lots of different locations. And that is going to swell up and overflow in certain places. Well, and even if you see it, there's so many dry river beds in the mountains that and people just don't think about them as such. They're just something to walk across.
But there's a reason that is there and you get a strong enough water event and there will be water in that again or don't or don't recognize. That's the, you know, that even when you're, for example, teaching students and you show them satellite imagery of say an agricultural area that has a little bit of an uneven landscape. And I say, you know, they say the spiderweb pattern was like, well, what is that?
And I'm like, well, that's a, that's essentially a drainage for excess water, but it only comes into play when there's excess water, right? The rest of the time it's dry and you can't really see it necessarily from the ground. But you can certainly see it in the differential moisture.
And so, but yeah, in the mountains where gravity takes over and you have all this fast runoff and when you have high rain events and you don't have soil that can absorb it, then pathways are already there and they will find them again.
But and you take on top of that, that you also change the flow of water with development because there's a lot of you know, heartbreaking imagery, really, of just roads gone, including major interstates here in the U. S., the I 40, just whole sections that are gone. I mean, the water brushes over and, as you say, Frank, underneath it, and it gives way. It can't, it can't handle that, but that's also the pathway, that is the least resistance to get the water both around, over and under it.
The 2017 flood in Texas, that's Harvey. I think it was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so that's a great example of where a built environment has a significant impact on where water is going to go. Large part of that flooding was directly attributable to the, the hard landscapes of development in a area that is in fact, fairly, fairly flat relative. Well, certainly relative to someplace like West Virginia, very flat, but it, you know, yeah.
Areas that the floodway had done, or as the floodplains had denoted changed, and I think that's an important thing to remember about whether we're talking about 100 year floodplain or 500 year floodplain, or even a thing that's called a thousand year floodplain, though. I don't think I've ever seen a thousand year floodplain map, but it exists. Those things are point in time calculations.
So as the landscape alters, because usually of human intercession into the landscape, that's going to change the flood plain significantly. And one of the challenges that I know FEMA has is that You know, not for a Florida or even a California or New York where there's a lot of resources and there's an understanding, this is highly variable. They tend to update those South Carolina where Jesse and Sue are at.
They tend to up to those a little more regularly, but for certainly interior areas or other such places, it can be sometimes a decade before that data is updated to reflect the changes in the environment. Yeah, which, which makes it difficult for planning. And I think one of the other things, and again, we're seeing it play out here, and we're seeing it play out in Florida.
We've seen it with, with every major event, and not just here places in Europe, other places have seen some very heavy flooding recently, but that our risk maps and our planning don't easily take into account visually, at least, and if they do you know, correct me on this, but the risks for your health and safety The event itself aren't terrible enough, but then the post event, so for example there's been a lot of media reports here in the U. S.
that basically western North Carolina is closed, right? So many roads have suffered damage either from landslides or just being undermined or flooding like the waters over them that you literally cannot travel there, but that kind of infrastructure impact is very, You know, very dangerous in the post event both for response and also for, you know, people being able to get supplies and all that, but we don't have necessarily a good way to model that either.
So where, how high the, the water goes or how the initial event impacts you will be compounded by the longterm effects afterward. And I think that that's one of the things that may be an emergency response and, and, and I think geospatial can help this at the data, right? Is that. If, in fact, a difficult event happens or a catastrophic event or a terrible event, then this is also going to be impacted besides, you know, obviously the risk to your homes and things like that.
These are the roads and the infrastructure that will no longer be available to you. And so you may look at that as potential risk and say, well, then maybe we need to do something else in terms of how we tell the population, you know, how we respond before the event arrives.
And, and Sue, that, I, I do want to give props to our emergency management in West Virginia because this is something they looked at which is you do have the digital divide of a lot of this is available geospatially through devices for people that know how to use them and are aware of them. But a lot of times for the elderly or people in certain populations, they, they don't have access or they're not aware.
And so they've set up tools and programs to have people in the community that do have access and ability to reach out to the elderly and other people in those regions afterwards with a lot of these responses to, you know, document things, ask for help, ask for someone to come assess their home to, to bridge that divide that's, that's out there.
So I think you brought up a really important word there, landslides with regard to this particular tragedy, but, and the reason I think that's important is because it's something that. Oftentimes, I think people want to think singularly about these sort of calamities. This is the effect of a hurricane. Well, yeah, but there are also a lot of associated negative consequences that can be many times, vastly more damaging than the initial hurricane.
Like Jesse said, what happened in Western North Carolina was they got a crap ton of rain, and then they got a hurricane. So it was a couple of events. One in and of itself wasn't necessarily devastating, though, but not particularly helpful. Certainly soften the ground. The second event kind of tipped it over the edge, but then they got subsequent big events that happened afterwards. Not just the flooding, but there's landslides that, you know, water will recede given enough time in most cases.
Landslides, once they've slid, they're there until somebody gets there and digs it out and when you're talking about mountain areas like West Virginia, like Western North Carolina, oftentimes you end up with transportation networks that are singular. There's a way to get in and a way to get out and a landslide that is triggered by these rain events. Usually, but not always.
If that takes out that, that way, then you've got inadequate access to food, to water, to fuel, to anything you need to survive. And some of the way that we build the environment is based upon the notion of that won't be a problem. There are, there's a, there's a little plaza in a, On Charleston, West Virginia, then the 2016 thousand year flood event has a bridge that gets to it. And that bridge got taken out. Bridge took like a couple of years to rebuild.
So that Plaza just basically all these people lost their livelihood. There was no way to get the cars that were in the parking lot. There's nothing. It took a long time to bring that back up to speed. And that was really a result of, you know, a bridge. Unable to take care of the flood. Not so much directly when it is, but we think about the one event and don't realize that there are many events that that can be tied to it. A classic example in hurricanes, of course, is storm surge.
So, our collective advisor had a lot of damage to his North Carolina house. That. was really the, really the result of storm surge, not so much the hurricane itself, though that was obviously a significant factor that drove the storm surge. So I think we tend to think about these things in a singular fashion and don't realize this is a complex system. And this sort of relates to the news item that we started with, which is a climate change, right?
This is a complex system and these things have secondary effects. And when we supercharge one thing, these other things are going to be charged as well, and that can have real lasting negative consequences. And so as we look at all these things together, looking at you know, the Potential for devastation in the United States.
Again, not just from flooding and hurricanes, but, you know, the wealth of natural hazards that we face every day living in the world, let alone in North America, you know, there's these questions of risk and how we can address them. There are ways, there are tools, and there are agencies who are looking at these things, whether it be anything from understanding how our atmospheric conditions are.
Changing day to day, including potentially a new storm forming in the Gulf right now, or in the next week that could impact the same area again. We don't know yet, but it's 1 of those things, you know, having Noah there. It's not just data. It's also the National Weather Service having these sources, having FEMA with the D firm maps whether they're contested, like, they have been here where we are. Or, you know, places that accept the fact that this is a scientific result of data.
Well, I mean, we're talking about federal, but state and local, and, and to be fair, right they learn from every event, too. Every event we unfortunately have to live through they get, you know, they get better at it.
They go and, you know, what worked and what can we do, you know, more to, to help people because that's our, Responsibility, but so you've got in addition to lots of federal agencies and and you've got state to every state has people working hard on counties, local municipalities when they can all kinds of all kinds of agencies at that level as well. And then you have, of course, things like the change of resolution and data that allows to go to.
I just wanted to say this so I can say this one thing, the Q3 data to the defer maps because that was a shift from, you know, having access to 30 meter elevation data to light are and, you know, much higher resolution 5, 10 meter elevation data. That's what allowed that transition to happen. About 20 years ago. And it's important to know, I mean, you brought up a really, really critical issue there, Jesse, just wanting to say Q3 that this data isn't developed and held just for one purpose.
It may spark that purpose, but it can be used more broadly and is used more broadly among federal agencies, among state agencies, among private companies, everyone benefits from better elevation data at some level. So. One of the things that we, you know, we think, well, FEMA spent all this money in, for example, in the case of West Virginia, after the 2016 flood FEMA spent millions of dollars collecting really high resolution elevation and imagery data for West Virginia.
And Oh, why did FEMA spend all this money in a place like West Virginia that has relatively low population? Okay. But that data doesn't just get held for FEMA's uses. That debt, that data doesn't sit on a shelf somewhere only pulled out. And the next time there's the possibility of an emergency event, that data exists and agencies from economic development, from redistricting to transportation planning to you name it, to private companies can access it and utilize it for their own purpose.
So this is a very, I think, important feedback mechanism that we have, not just Emergency uses, but it's used for other things that emergency uses can then take the value added products that those companies and those agencies have developed to use for their future emergency management. It's a, it's a multiplier effect. I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like the Weather Channel has their own data set of population around the country and being able to give the number of people that are going to be impacted by a storm. No, they're using census data. They're using political boundaries, but they're also using data from NOAA and National Weather Service in terms of areas that are in the projected cone.
So yeah, I mean, all of this data that's government data is being used local, state and federal to support a lot of different initiatives, both within the. Emergency space and outside. So I actually really want to revisit this topic at some point, you know, that we covered a lot of things and we started with national flood insurance program. We never really got back to it which is can almost be its own topic. There's a lot to this and I think it's a fascinating area.
And I think that we can discuss this a little bit further, you know, but nobody wants a nine hour podcast. So if anybody from FEMA or the flood insurance program is listening, feel free to reach out. We'll be happy to do a conversation with you. Oh yeah, that'd be great. So onto the events corner, go to events. Check to make sure all of your events, if they're in the mountain areas in the east, that they're still taking place.
Otherwise, don't, don't forget that big events that are happening maybe 6, 7, 8, 9 months from now that things are closing now. So check into them now, such as a, a GI think that it's early bird just ended or about to end, for example. And Esri's uc, their call for papers. I think it's open or soon to be open and it will be closing in November.
So, you know, these things you need to start thinking about them in the fall if you're thinking about them and if you're intending to go in the spring or the summer and that's same with internships. They're open now, you know, usually September to December, January. So if anyone's looking at any of the internships with industry or federal agencies to start looking. So I know a lot of the states, North Carolina, South Carolina, that. Summer internships are open now, so don't, don't wait too long.
That's an event we never talked about, but anyway, those are important. Fortunately, we don't get to do internships. But you get to supervise them. Of course, if you'd like us to add to your event, please send us an email to podcast at veryspatial. com. If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at sue at veryspatial. com. I'm Barb at veryspatial. com. You can reach me at frank at veryspatial.
com. And I'm available at Kinda Spatial, and you can find all of our contact information over at veryspatial. com slash contacts. As always, we're the folks from Very Spatial. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you in a couple weeks. That's what you get when you act the fool. Just one of these days, y'all gonna get played better. Watch your back. It's gonna get personal. Don't gimme this. Don't what? Get act the fool. Back when I feel like it's going to get personal. It's going to get personal.