About – What's new

Introducing Modelspaces: Get your hydrodynamic models into SCALGO Live

Mar 18, 2021

With SCALGO Live modelspaces you can now import your hydrodynamic models into SCALGO Live where the simulation results come to life through advanced visualisation, interactive exploration and easy sharing with colleagues, clients and consultants.

A Modelspace rendering a flux layer along with velocity arrows for a particular timestep in the simulation.

You can read more about Modelspaces on the add-on page or get the details in the documentation.

Use case videos

Mar 9, 2021

We have made new learning material that demonstrates how you can approach different projects based on concrete use cases. These new use-case videos cover a wide range of topics and demonstrate how the tools in SCALGO Live can be used for different purposes. The videos will give you inspiration about out what projects are possible with SCALGO Live, and provide you with guidance on how to carry them out.

Some of the use case videos available.

Just getting started with SCALGO Live? We also have a number of getting started videos that can help you with the basics.

Links to the use case and getting started videos are available from the Help menu inside SCALGO Live.

Access a EA flood maps inside SCALGO Live

Mar 4, 2021

By popular demand we have made some of the Environment Agency flood risk assessment maps and flood zone maps for England available directly in SCALGO Live.

Flood maps for planning

From the flood maps for planning service we have added the following layers:

  • Areas benefiting from flood defence
  • Flood defence
  • Flood storage area
  • Flood zone 2
  • Flood zone 3
  • Main rivers
EA Flood zones and associated information inside SCALGO Live

Flood warning information service

From the flood warning information service we have added depth and speed layers for the low, medium and high risk rainfall scenarios corresponding to return periods of 30, 100 and 1000 years. To make this easily accessible inside SCALGO Live we have created a slider that allows you to quickly navigate between the return periods. We have also given you filters on water depth and velocity so you can focus on areas with a certain minimum water depth or velocity.

Flood and depth layer for a 1000 year event.

All the new layers are available from the library.

Improved map export

Mar 1, 2021

We have improved our system for exporting SCALGO Live maps to images as JPG and georeferenced PDFs. The new system is significantly faster than the old system and does a better job at determining an appropriate size for dialogs in the output, including the legend. By popular demand, we now also include vector data that you have dragged into SCALGO Live for visualisation in the exported document.

A JPG exported from SCALGO Live.

Try it out and don't hesitate to let us know what you think.

New powerful ways to edit the elevation model

Jan 21, 2021

A year back we asked ourselves: "What is the simplest and most intuitive way to shape the terrain and test how landscaping ideas influence the flow of surface water?". Since then we have worked hard, and today we release a brand new set of tools. Check it out in SCALGO Live, and let us know what you think.

Here we establish two basins and integrate them into the surrounding terrain.

Interested in learning more? You can sign up for our next webinar where we will demonstrate the tools in detail. The webinar is available in English and in Danish.

Read more about how to work with the new contour tools in the documentation.

Better coloring of flooding layers and sea-level depth filtering

Oct 22, 2020

The default coloring of flooded areas is now based on water depth, such that shallow areas are light blue and deep areas are dark blue, instead of the event based coloring that has been the traditional default choice in SCALGO Live. This makes the maps more intuitive and problematic areas easier to distinguish. The event based coloring is still available in the layer settings . In parallel we are also rolling out support for depth filtering in the sea-level rise analysis. This happens on a country-by-country basis.

The flash flood map at a 100mm rain event. (left) Old coloring by event, where dark blue areas flood at lower precipitation levels than light blue cells. (right) New coloring by water depth, where shallow areas are light blue and deep areas are dark blue.

National Danish High-Resolution Impervious Surface Mapping

Oct 2, 2020

Today we announce the availability of a nationwide high-resolution mapping of impervious surfaces for SCALGO Live in Denmark. The map, produced by SCALGO, is based on machine learning techniques and has a resolution of 20cm. It is available as a standalone layer in the Imperviousness category in the library. In Danish the category is called Befæstelseskort.

A section of the impervious suface mapping.

The mapping of impervious surfaces segments the country into 3 different classes: pervious, impervious and lake. The category is further subdivided into a building type and a general other impervious category.

Watershed queries

When you perform a watershed query you get the total area of impervious surfaces in the watershed.

A watershed query showing watershed imperviousness.

Annotated administrative regions

We have annotated a number of datasets, including the cadastral parcels, sewer catchments, planning zones as well as municipal regions with information about imperviousness. You can find those layers in the Imperviousness category alongside the impervious surfaces map itself. For each polygon in those data sets we have added a field that provides the total impervious area in the polygon, as well as the percentage of impervious surfaces.

A point query on the cadastral map showing the impervious surface area and the ratio of a cadastral polygon.

National access for local and regional organizations

Sep 24, 2020

We now give local users (e.g. municipalities and water utilities) access to the full national SCALGO Live setup in their country.

As a consequence, workspaces and links can now be shared freely between consulting engineers and local users. See the manual for more info on how to share workspaces.

Note that if you previously had access to a local theme to facilitate sharing (e.g., you are an engineer working for a municipality), this access will be revoked as it is now unnecessary and the local themes will be retired.

Special notice for WMTS users

If you use SCALGO Live WMTS services in external GIS software you will have to update your service URLs. You can fetch a fresh WMTS link in the ticket configuration page. No other changes are necessary. If you do not have easy access to change your WMTS settings and need a little time in which the old system is still available, please contact SCALGO Live support.

Simpler, more powerful downloads

Jul 29, 2020

We have made some updates to the way you download data and analysis results from SCALGO Live. Most notably, we have moved the file format and projection controls to the menu that appears after you have selected the layer you want to download, and we only show options relevant for the particular layer. This makes downloading easier if those details are not important to you. The update also includes new download features.

New features

We have also added new download options.

Lower resolution elevation model downloads

For many workflows external to SCALGO Live, the normal high-resolution elevation model available nationwide in SCALGO Live is too big to handle. You can now choose a resolution when you download, and the layer will be down-sampled to this resolution.

Downloading an 40cm resolution model as a 10m raster.

Download water depth for a particular sea-level rise event

Need to know exactly how high the water column on a cell is for a sea-level rise of e.g. 2 meters? You can now download a water depth raster for a particular sea-level rise.

Downloading a water depth raster representing the depth of the water at a water level of 1.71m.

Updates to the Danish elevation model

Since the Danish elevation model is partially updated every year, it is often important to understand when the data for a particular area was collected. To that end, we have added a layer, based on data from SDFE, showing the composition of the Danish elevation model (DHM). You can use the point query tool on this layer to get more information about the acquisition time for a particular area. The layer is available in the Elevation category in the library.

Current state of the DHM. The red areas are from 2019, the orange from 2018 and the blue and green from 2014 and 2015, respectively.

Alongside this change we have renamed the Danish analyses layers to simply "Denmark" to underline the fact that it does not make sense to attribute a single year to the model. As always, we will continue to update our analyses as the model evolves, to ensure you are always looking at the newest data.

Customize Layer Transparency

May 14, 2020

It is now possible to tweak the opacity of layers in SCALGO Live. Access the new setting through the gear menu on the layer. Naturally this also works when you generate links to SCALGO Live or when you export a map. The transparency setting can be used for a variety of things, including:

  • Slope-dependent shading on your orthophotos so you can more easily get a feeling for local topography.
  • Getting elevation profiles without having the elevation layer visible on the map.
  • Make analysis and information layers, such as watersheds and landuse, transparent to see or accent information in layers underneath them.

We have made a little video that shows these examples:

Georeferenced maps

We have added georeferencing to PDFs exported through our export map feature. This means that the map can be correctly positioned when opened in GIS or other software packages that support georeferenced PDFs.

Here a user have exported a pdf from SCALGO Live with the flash flood map on top of an orthophoto in Sweden. The user then annotated it in third party software and imported it into QGIS where it has been overlaid on the elevation model (acquired via WMTS from SCALGO Live)