Jerry Walker writes:

Hi Kathryn,
Not sure if you've seen this map or not. You can point and click and see what the water depth is in New Orleans, street by street. It's a google map, but I can't find the map on google itself.

http://www.cybergod.net/gmap/  http://mapper.cctechnol.com

Thanks so much for all you're doing!

Jerry

I tried it and it seems to work! Now all it needs is the addition of an address input field. But if you have the address already up in Google Maps in a separate browser window, then you can pretty much find what you are looking for.

It's creator, Teh Treag (aka cjames) says

We started off with LIDAR terrian model of the city.  Then, with some  reported water depths in  the city we projected the data into our model. I'm still waiting on the data processors to get some more data to me; right now we have over 2.5 million data points loaded into MySQL using the spatial features.  I expect this number to tripple as they continue refining the modeling.

The page uses AJAX to query the database for a 200x200m area and averages the result.

So far, the data appears to correlate well with the post storm images.

Gods of Google Maps, you've answered my prayers once by adding the Katrina button. Please come through for me by adding the depth info.

To Google Earth users: are their overlays already integrating this info?

(Someone else may have sent this URL to me previously, but I've been pretty busy and have lost some of the things I planned to check out in the rising tide in my inbox.)

SEE ALSO: Flood Level Maps, which gives you an idea of which parts were flooded at various stages on the flooding and this Customized Dynamic Map of New Orleans. You guys are heroes. This kind of information is tremendouly important  to the people whose houses or relatives were there.  Also, it may even  have cash value to the victims, in that I suspect it will make dealing  with FEMA claims officials and their insurance comapnies a lot easier if there is  physical evidence of the damage to homes.