Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Southern Florida

In this academic exercise, Southern Florida was used in a scenario that would provide visuals exhibiting the effects of sea level rise due to global warming on human and animal populations along its coastline. Geology, location, ecosystems, census information, buildings, and infrastructure were researched to make accurate assumptions on this scenario. To simulate sea level rises, the inundation of southern Florida’s coastlines and Broward County were modeled in ArcScene using a USGS seamless DEM with a vertical exaggeration of 100 to bring out the visual effect. A flat, blue, semitransparent layer was added and given base height offsets of two and four that illustrate the large amount of land that would be submerged with a sea level rise of two and four meters. Additionally, using the same technique, models of the Broward County area were created with additional population and infrastructure information to demonstrate the damaging effects that sea level rise would have on the area.

Courtesy of the Center for Geographic Information System Research, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.