05-06-2006 - Earth

sagar: Author=’Eleanor Imster’ program=” video=”A road that once ran through miles of farmland now trails into the rising waters of Devils Lake. Minnewaukan, ND, June, 2004. (FEMA/Brian Hvinden)
_Bob Brakenridge:_ During a big flood disaster, all attention is focused on that area. A year later? The forgetting begins. And three, four, five years later, people have forgotten about it.

_JB:_ This is “Earth & Sky”:/, and that was Bob Brakenridge of the “Dartmouth Flood Observatory”:http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/. He and his colleagues have spent two decades compiling the first objective record of worldwide flood events – a “global atlas of flood hazard”:http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/Atlas.html.

_DB:_ They’re doing it by watching flooding from space. Research satellites monitor the entire planet and record images of flood events as they’re happening. Scientists hope this data archive will help predict where and when major floods will happen and keep people out of harm’s way.

_JB:_ But as population grows worldwide, the lands close to streams and rivers become increasingly developed. And, Brakenridge said, our current methods of flood management aren’t working.

_Brakenridge:_ As we control water upstream, by putting levees along the rivers, we deliver more water downstream. So instead of local flooding in the tributaries, you have a big river that’s filling up. So I think we have a long ways to go in dealing with this.

_DB: To look up where you live in the “flood hazard atlas”:http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/Atlas.html, and see where on Earth it’s “flooding right now”:http://www.hewsweb.org/floods/, come to earthsky.org. Special thanks to “NASA”:http://www.nasa.gov:_ explore, discover, understand. We’re Block and Byrd for “Earth & Sky”:/http://208.96.63.114/.

Written by EarthSky