High-Level Project Summary
In the recent years we have seen flooding in East London affecting Londoners immensely. We tried to find the root cause of it and came to the conclusion that sea level rise is acting as a key factor in East London flooding which is a major cause for flooding worldwide.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
London has always been vulnerable to the sea level rise as the high tides in river Thames brings increased water levels to the rivers in the city. Which in turn causes flooding when the water level goes above the permitted limit. The high tide level of the Thames has risen over time and the risk from tidal surges has increased.
From the below graph you can see that the water level has risen in River Roding over the years causing Flood Severity level going up. This agrees with Nasa report on worldwide sea level rise, which is a major cause of flooding.
According to climate.nasa.gov water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the expansion of seawater as it warms, causes sea level rise. Which in turn causes the water level rise in rivers as we can see in the river Thames case. As it is a high tide river, river Thames brings water from seas causing water level rise for surrounding rivers in London.
In a report from climate.nasa.gov we can see a flatten sea level rise over the period of 1960s-1980s, which was a direct result of Global dam projects.
We have gathered from historical insight that Dam projects were beneficial for London sea level decrease. We would like to sum up our findings by saying, as sea level rising causes water level rise in rivers, reinacting dams in sea and river beds would help prevent floods.
To conclude, we would like to stress that fact that, due to time shortage we could not do more research on solid establishment of our findings. There is a future prospect in carrying on research on whether Dam Projects could be the solution to London flooding and in turn worldwide flooding.
Space Agency Data
According to the satellite data found in https://climate.nasa.gov website, the sea level has been risen 101.4 millimetres since 1993. We also get to know from the website is that sea level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the expansion of seawater as it warms. While Greenland & Antarctic Ice Sheets, Thermal expansion, Mountain glaciers was causing the sea level to rise, Global dam projects lowered the rise over the period of 1960s-1980s.
Hackathon Journey
Our Space Apps experience has been very inspiring and educational. We have learnt the many ways climate change is affecting the world and specifically how it is affecting our local city in East London. The weather-induced events of recent years have awoken many Londoners to the force of climate change with wetter winters, heavier downpour and increasingly stormy weather causing flooding and damage to infrastructure and services, some of which had been in place since Victorian times. Therefore we were inspired to see how rapid this change has taken place, in particular flooding, over the last two decades and how this inevitably will change how Londoners live in years to come.
Our approach was to gather data and, media images on rising sea levels and local flooding and to use MS Excel to analyse and represent the data. As we are very new to Data Science, have not been long on our study course, we did not have the coding ability to mine some of the data we found which was a setback but hope to enter the challenge again next time to put our new-found skills to the test(!).
We would like to thank our course tutor Dr Mohammad Nour Albaarini of Birmingham City University for making us aware of the NASA Space Apps Challenge and encouraging us to take part.
References
- https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
- https://check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk/how-we-measure-river-sea-groundwater-levels
- https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map-viewer
- https://climatelondon.org/climate-change/flooding/#:~:text=London%20is%20prone%20to%20flooding,levels%20and%20higher%20tidal%20surges.
- https://environment.data.gov.uk/portalstg/home/item.html?id=da003769a0c3490981bfd426d3253540
- https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol6/pp14-18
- https://check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk/station/7381
- https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/environmental-studies/sea-level-rise-london-uk
Tags
flooding, sea level rise, global warming, London flooding