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Flooding Google Earth

We’ve discussed how flooding can be visualized a few times in Google Earth, because it’s a great medium with which to show off catastrophes such as that. In addition to helping with fresh imagery from recent floods in Pakistan and Nashville, it’s also been used to help bring to life the 1966 flood in Florence and an animation of how rising sea levels would affect various cities.

Today’s post comes from Richard Treves over at Google Earth Design. He’s recently read Will Self’s “Book of Dave“, which imagines a future where sea levels have risen over 100 meters.

Richard has taken that idea and given step-by-step instructions on how to simulate a 100m rise in sea level for any area of the world. I took his example and put it over London, with the results seen here:

To view that file in Google Earth, you can download this KMZ file.

It’s a great way to visualize something like this, and Richard put together a great guide for it. However, I’d like to make one small correction. In step #4, he advises choosing “Relative to Ground” for the water level. While this will put water 100m deep in the area you choose, it’s not necessarily representative of a 100m rise in sea level. Instead, choose “Absolute” in step #4 (as I did in the KMZ above) to see what it would be like if the sea level rose 100m world wide.

As Richard mentions, and as you’ll see in the screenshot above, leaving 3D buildings turned on is a great way to see the scale of the depth of water. Check out his blog and go try it for yourself.

The WaterAid Point Mapper, helping find fresh water

As we’ve discussed a few times, water is a remarkably scare resource in many parts of the world, and Google Earth has proven to be a great way to learn more about the problem. A great example is the UNICEF: Water and Sanitation layer that was released a few years ago.

The folks at WaterAid have recently developed a Mapping tool called the Water Point Mapper. It takes data via Microsoft Excel and uses macros to generate KML files. The tool is now widely used by WaterAid country programs and partner organizations across sub-Saharan Africa to map rural water points. The tool empowers communities to manage their water sources and offers district level planning and resource allocation.

The Mapper can generate a range of point based and area based maps for monitoring a wide selection of status indicators. The list includes water source coverage (with and without functionality), functionality, water source type, revenue collection and access distance. Also a range of water quality parameters can be mapped, such as fluoride and iron. It can be configured for use in any country, as long as you can provide them with the necessary shapefiles for district and sub-district administrative levels.

There aren’t any sample files on the site, but they were kind enough to produce a few of them for us that you can check out. The first is a fairly standard map (KMZ file):

The next is a map that features “radius of influence” spheres, so you can see how much area each specific water distribution point is able to affect (KMZ file):

For more info, check out their site at www.waterpointmapper.org.

SketchUp Pro Case Study: Daniel Company

This user story comes from Mark Lessmueller at Daniel Company. It came in via the Tell us your story link on the Sketchup Go Green! site.

Daniel Company has switched to Sketchup Pro for the drafting, design, analysis and construction of its air pollution control systems. Sketchup Pro has helped us visualize potential problems in 3D, allowing us to find conflicts on the computer, rather than in the field. This prevents us from wasting material and resources and reduces our carbon footprint. In addition, we can share our drawings and models with anyone across the globe. They can make suggestions directly on the drawings without having to resort to awkward phone conversations about “what change needs to be implemented where”.

This simplicity allows our clients to ensure that there are no intersections with existing equipment onsite during modifications. Additionally, due to the low cost of Sketchup Pro (especially in comparison to similar products), we were able to install Sketchup Pro on virtually all of our engineering computers, rather than just the drafters’ machines. The ability for our engineers to do some of our drafting when the drawings are “bottlenecking” production has proven invaluable.

We are about to begin start-up of the first system we created with SketchUp: a biological system where microorganisms digest the odorous pollutants. The system relies entirely on wastewater treatment plant products to feed the bacteria, rather than the typical method of spraying highly reactive neutralizing chemicals into the polluted airstream. The resultant waste of the bacteria can then be conveyed back into the wastewater treatment plant and treated via the microbes in that system.

While the air pollution control system was originally conceived by the treatment plant’s design consultant engineer, the actual odor control system manufacture was drafted, designed, analyzed, and constructed using Sketchup and LayOut. This includes an air conveyance system, hydraulic profiles, plumbing layouts, water control panels, two 12′ Ø x 40′ tall fiberglass reactors, and two 12′ Ø x 20′ tall fiberglass adsorbers. (Each of the 12′ Ø vessels was made in our shop in accordance to the LayOut files.) As the system is starting up, we are also planning to visualize this model in Google Earth.

Each of the pieces of the ducting (which supplies fresh air to the building and captures the foul air) was modeled in SketchUp and then turned into a cut sheet. Our fiberglass duct, tank, and scrubber shop easily fabricated the individual pieces. Thanks to Sketchup, it is a lot easier to make sure that each piece will fit on a truck (sent from California to Virginia), rather than relying on 2D drafting.

Since this was our first major project in SketchUp, most of it was created using the standard SketchUp tools. The plugins we did use were mostly custom modifications of plugins that were available for alteration. The CenterPoint and Conetop plugins were used to help make pipe transitions and to align pipes. We modified the Mesh Additions and the Parametric scripts to create an “elbow tool”. The PVC piping in the water panels was created with a combination of native SketchUp tools, this “elbow tool” plugin and the CenterPoint plugin.

Since this project, we have created multiple other air pollution control projects using SketchUp and LayOut. We’ve also used quite a few other freeware plugins. (We’re big fans of Fredo6 and Chris Fullmer’s plugins). FredoScale and Joint Push Pull have saved us on a number of more delicate projects, especially where we make a small apparatus and then need to show thickness in the ducting, or building our damper library. And Chris Fullmer’s Shape Bender has helped out quite a bit for other jobs where nothing else seems to work.

We’re now working to model some of our older existing projects in SketchUp and visualize them in Google Earth.