Floods of Transient Data

OpenStreetMap was not conceived as a platform for storing transient geographical data: traffic jams, road works, road closures, earthquake damage, barricades in city centres or floods. However it is used widely for holding such information for all cases except the first.

The recent flooding in Britain has led to a degree of questioning about how we should hold such data, but it has also reawakened an interest of mine in seeing if OpenStreetMap data can be used for simple modelling of hydrological systems.

First I discuss transient data and look at a different aspect of flooding, the availability of suitable data, in the second part of this post.

Flooding in the Somerset Levels mapped on OSM
using key natural=water
copyright OSM contributors, CC-BY-SA