Spiral Topiary Tutorials
Visualizing the impact of sea level rise on danish coastal communities
This project was made with the intent of raising local awareness of the potential devastating impacts on Danish coastal communities, that global warming could have, if the IPCC goals for emissions reductions are not reached.
Lasse Pedersen, climate expert in the Danish Society for Nature conservation, and myself did a series of projections of the global sea level rise, adjusting them to Danish conditions to visualize the potential risk of failing to take the climate crisis seriously. The sea level projections were a combination of several IPCC estimates, both of mean sea level rise as well as flooding events, then subtracted with models for the land rise taking place in Denmark. Much of the Danish land mass is currently rising out of the ocean, after being compressed by the mass of the glaciers in the last ice age.
With technical sparring and support from Prof. Karsten Arnbjerg-Nielsen (DTU), these estimates were made for several locations in Denmark.
On the figure, Hvide Sande, on the west coast of Jutland, is depicted with the transparent red layer signifying the new mean water level combined with a flooding event.
I used a digital elevation model (DEM) from SCALGOlive (0,8 x 0,8 m resolution), and a custom-made water level layer, based on the calculated sea level projections described above.
To visualize it, I used Blender (open source software), and draped the DEM with a topographical map from Open Street Map, as well as the new sea level extent.