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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have updated SCALGO Live in Sweden with new elevation data and buildings from Lantmäteriet. While updating the elevation data we have introduced more than 1 million hydrological corrections that improve the description of flow paths through culverts or under bridges across the country. We also added a range of new data sets that have been requested by users. This is our biggest update for Sweden yet. We hope you enjoy it. Read more below or in the manual.

Hydrological corrections

Bridges, culverts and other structures, where water is transported below the surface of the terrain, are not represented in a traditional digital elevation model. When analysing elevation models, bridges therefore act as dams creating spurious depressions and missing culverts fail to transport water creating erroneous flow paths. Hydrological corrections supplement the elevation model by representing the subsurface flow paths of culverts and bridges. This update of SCALGO Live includes a new nationwide hydrological correction data set that SCALGO has created using advanced algorithms and Machine Learning techniques together with Lantmäteriet's nationwide elevation model and data about rivers and streams.

Conservative corrections

The conservative corrections have been generated at locations where streams and rivers intersect railroads, roads, dams, weirs, or buildings, as well as invisible river sections where the river e.g. runs through a longer covered/piped area. The river network used for generating the corrections comes from Lantmäteriet's Hydrografi Nedladdning and the new corrections are therefore reliable up to the standard of Hydrografi Nedladdning. These corrections are automatically included in new workspaces and are also used in the national analysis available in SCALGO Live.

Comprehensive corrections

We have also developed a new Machine Learning technique that predicts where hydrological corrections exist with high probability. The result is a nationwide set of suggested corrections with an unprecedented coverage. They are not automatically included in the national analysis or workspaces, they are suggestions that can be imported into a workspace on request and checked by the user. We believe this has the potential to save a lot of time when setting up a new workspace by avoiding the time consuming task of manually creating all hydrological corrections.

New data sets

Fastighetsindelning Visning

The cadastral map from Lantmäteriet has been added. The data set is provided as WMS, meaning that changes to cadastral borders are incorporated on a daily basis.

Ortofoto Visning

The latest orthophoto products from Lantmäteriet have been added. The available orthophoto resolutions are now 16 cm, 25 cm, 40 cm and 50 cm. Orthophotos will be served as WMS, meaning that changes and updates of orthophotos are incorporated on a daily basis.

Hydrografi Nedladdning

The most highly detailed data set of the Swedish river network ever produced. The data set contains a national coverage of all streams, standing water bodies, wetlands, dams and more in a scale of 1:25 000. It is available for use in SCALGO Live and for download.

GE.Jordarter 1:25 000-1:100 000

SGU's Jordarter 1:25 000 - 1:100 000 has also been made available as an INSPIRE data set. We have collected and organized the data into one unified national data set available for use in SCALGO Live and for download.

We have made improvements to the way you export maps from SCALGO Live to a PDF document or an image, it has never been easier to produce cool and informative maps for your reports and presentations. You now choose exactly what you want in your map by drawing a rectangle directly on the map. Furthermore, the default state of the tool has been simplified to remove advanced options. If you are interested in more control over the size, scale or resolution of the exported map, you can switch to advanced mode where you can e.g. choose to export a print-quality A4 document in landscape mode.

Furthermore we have bundled the tool with the download tool under a new "Export" heading. The previous generic "Actions" menu has been replaced with a "Help" menu, making it easier for you to get help on using SCALGO Live.

Profile and land use/soil type exports

Exports from the profile window, or exports of watershed land use or soil type information from the watershed tool are now available in Microsoft Excel's xlsx format by default, removing the hassle of dealing with CSV files. Should you require a CSV file, you can change the default export type in your account dashboard.

Danish surface model

We have added the Danish Digital Surface Model (DSM) to SCALGO Live and it is available for workspace use as well as download. The DSM includes vegetation and buildings, whereas the regular elevation models available in SCALGO Live (used for hydrological computations), try to capture the bare earth elevation and to this end do not have vegetation and buildings.

You can find the new layer alongside the other elevation models in the library.

With the latest update of SCALGO Live we have added a number of additional layers to SCALGO Live, and given you the ability to add even more. These layers are made available (hosted) by various government agencies and we are rendering the data directly as it comes from their servers.

Denmark

We have added data from Danmarks Arealinformation, Danmarks Miljøportal, Plandata, GEUS and SDFE.

Sweden

We have added data from Vatteninformationssystem Sverige, Naturvårdsverket, and Länsstyrelserna.

Norway

We have added data from Miljødirektoratet, Kartverket and NIBIO.

You can find the extra layers in the library. Where possible, we show you the legend for the data you are seeing and we also support using the point query tool to query individual features in the layers.

Note that these layers are not served by SCALGO, they are often significantly slower to render - and may not render on higher zoom-levels.

Add your own layers to your organisation

Organization administrators can now add additional layers (from WMS services) through the dashboard. Layers added in this way will be visible to your entire organization and is a good way to expose internal or external data that is particularly relevant to your organization.

SCALGO Live now supports importing centerlines and cross-sectional geometry for rivers and streams from VASP, a Danish stream management software from Orbicon (now WSP). When imported, the stream data will be represented as a normal workspace terrain edit that carves out the river in the terrain model. After importing the stream you can continue to edit the river itself by changing the cross sections or the centerline, you can of-course also change the surrounding terrain by adding dikes or other terrain features using the normal terrain editing tools in SCALGO Live.

Orbicon (now WSP) has prepared a document that describes how to export the data from VASP.

For more information see press release (in Danish).