[FoxPUG] May meeting notes

[Christian Long]

Mamadou presented the talk he gave at the [AAG Annual
Meting](www.aag.org/cs/events/event_detail?eventId=1022) in San
Francisco.

His focus is identifying urban areas that are at risk of flooding. He
has used GIS to develop a model that can be applied cheaply and
systematically wherever it is needed. He is basing his model on
freely-available elevation and land-use data.

Starting with elevation data, he develops a stream and drainage model.
He also develops a land use model based on aerial photos. He combines
the two models to identify populated areas that are close to risky
waterways.

His model is built on the ArcGIS programming interface. Towards the
end of the demo, he showed a way of generating a Python script from
the model graph.

We talked about the new [Google Earth
Engine](https://earthengine.google.com/) project. In that environment,
Google gives you access to high-resolution (and expensive) data sets.
You run your processing on Google's platform, and you get the results
of your analysis. However, you can not download the high-res data
yourself. We discussed the tradeoffs of using Google's high-res data
vs using lower-res freely-available data.

His vision is to make this model available for anyone to use, so they
can easily identify high-risk areas in any urban setting. Further, he
wants to make that information available through a mobile app using
geolocation.

Thanks for a great meeting, and we'll [see you in
June](http://foxpython.tumblr.com/post/143768552872/june-meeting)!