[Tagging] How to tag flood prone points and areas?

Warin 61sundowner at gmail.com
Sun Sep 1 22:57:31 UTC 2019


On 1/9/19 10:31 pm, François Lacombe wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> flood_prone=yes doesn't sound to be good semantics.


Think those are the words used on signs, so for English areas they make 
sense..

> Should we rewrite it as floodable=* with 3 or four big level of 
> probability (or causes, or whatever) instead?


I don't think floodable is right .. to me it says that a feature has a 
tolerance for flooding, once the flood is past the feature is ok. Where 
as flood_prone says the feature may be under water (flooded) from time 
to time. After the flood flood_prone says nothing about the recovery of 
the feature from the flooding.

>
> Many people raised concerns about yes/no tags and the key name seem to 
> contain two distinct information (floodable + probability) while the 
> value meaning could be improved.
>
> Furthermore, such work can be useful for many hazard description.
> This proposal is interesting : 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/hazard
>
> Floods can also occur on river banks surroundings when hydropower is 
> in operation upstream
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2018-July/037973.html
> Here is what is often displayed : https://imgur.com/a/TLhZcgE
>
> All the best
>
> François
>
> Le dim. 1 sept. 2019 à 14:07, Joseph Eisenberg 
> <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com <mailto:joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com>> a écrit :
>
>     For `flood_probability` to be useful and verifiable in some way, there
>     should be a link to the source in the changeset, or perhaps also
>     source: flood_probability= on the object.
>
>     Such statistical features like "1% risk of flood per year" can't
>     really be verified by individual mappers, since they are based on
>     calculations of the floodplain geometry and historical observations of
>     floods over many decades. So it's probably more useful to have these
>     mapped in official sources which are kept up-to-date, rather than
>     importing the data from the external source into OSM, and then having
>     to maintain it in our database.
>
>     I agree that if there is a sign that says "this area prone to
>     flooding", then "flood_prone=yes" is verifiable and helpful to add,
>     since that's representing a feature that can be checked when the area
>     is next survey.
>
>     On 9/1/19, Paul Allen <pla16021 at gmail.com
>     <mailto:pla16021 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > On Sun, 1 Sep 2019 at 05:24, Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com
>     <mailto:61sundowner at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     > You could add flood_prone=yes to the car park tag but that will
>     show the
>     >> whole car park as affected, whereas it's only the bit down this
>     end that
>     >> has a problem. Would drawing a separate area & marking that as
>     >> flood_prone=yes work?
>     >>
>     >
>     > Better than nothing.  If you feel adventurous, you could try
>     mapping it as
>     > two, non-overlapping,
>     > constituent areas of a multipolygon and see what happens.
>     >
>     >> I asked this question some time ago. I was told it was not
>     verifiable and
>     >> therefore not for OSM.
>     >>
>     >
>     > My opinion is that if there is signage/road markings it's
>     verifiable and
>     > mappable.  When we
>     > map the speed limit of a road from signs the only actual, verifiable
>     > information we have is
>     > the presence of the sign, but we assume the sign is true and
>     infer the
>     > speed limit of the
>     > road from it.  Same thing here: sign says it's prone to floods
>     so we infer
>     > the place is prone to
>     > floods.
>     >
>     > Where I differ from some is that I'd consider official documents
>     also
>     > providing verifiability
>     > provided their copyright permits it.
>     >
>     > However there is the question of frequency, once in 10 year
>     event, once in
>     >> 100 etc. So I would add a sub tag or value about frequency of
>     the event..
>     >> The key frequency is already in use. Period has some use too,
>     though the
>     >> use looks to be years.. no wiki to say what it is?
>     >>
>     >
>     > Period is the multiplicative inverse of frequency: normalize the
>     units,
>     > multiply them together
>     > and the result should be 1.  Neither is appropriate in this case.  A
>     > once-in-100-year event
>     > does not occur at 100 year intervals, it has a probability of  1% of
>     > occurring (technically,
>     > being equalled or exceeded) in any given year.
>     > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-year_flood
>     > So we should be tagging a probability.  Technically, exceedance
>     probability
>     > for floods.
>     >
>     > Taginfo shows floodplain_probability used 77 times.  Is that
>     sensible?
>     > It's a floodplain or it isn't.
>     > Also flood_probability 4 times (better) and hazard:probability
>     once.  The
>     > flood_probability value
>     > in taginfo is "100y" rather than 1%.  People who used
>     > floodplain_probability divide into those
>     > who expressed a large number like 100 (probably meaning years)
>     and those
>     > who expressed
>     > a small number like 1 or 0.5 (probably a percentage). The only
>     value for
>     > hazard:probability
>     > is "low" (which I consider to be effectively meaningless).
>     >
>     > I dislike floodplain_probability because it IS a floodplain with a
>     > probability of being
>     > flooded, not a probability of an area being classified as a
>     floodplain.
>     > Also because
>     > it's been given both in terms of years and percentages (except it's
>     > impossible to be sure
>     > because nobody has given units, so maybe the 100 means it's 100%
>     likely to
>     > flood and
>     > the 0.5 means it is likely to flood every six months). It's a mess.
>     >
>     > I'm fairly happy with flood_probability.  There's something
>     nagging at the
>     > back of my
>     > mind saying I ought to be unhappy with flood_probability, but
>     it's not
>     > telling me why.
>     >
>     > I like hazard:probability, especially if we document that it
>     should be
>     > tagged as a
>     > percentage (and ignore or fix the sole value of "low").  Only
>     problem with
>     > it is that
>     > hazard=* is a proposal from 2007 that is supposedly still
>     active, so we'd
>     > have
>     > to do something about hazard=*.  Then again there is
>     hazard_prone=* and
>     > hazard_type=* which seem to have appeared in the wiki without a
>     proposal
>     > and have a few thousand uses.
>     >
>     > --
>     > Paul
>     >
>
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