Exploratory: generated automatically from the UmaTerra platforms' data; not independently validated or peer reviewed.

UmaTerra · story Português
City · water · climate · United States

Houston and Harvey: the city that grew over the prairie, and the rain of 2017

Between 2000 and 2020 Harris County, which is Houston and what grew around it, covered much of the coastal prairie and the wetlands that held water back with city. In August 2017 Hurricane Harvey stalled over Texas for four days. This story measures the growth year by year, the rain, the bayous and the water seen by radar, and reads the climate ahead in climate-shift.

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—of the county built up, 2000 → 2020 measured
—of wetlands in the county, 2000 → 2020 measured
—of rain in one week in west Houston, by satellite estimated
—bayous measured with their record peak in 2017 measured

measured by satellite, by a gauge or from the geometry itself. estimated projected by climate models, or a reading that depends on a threshold. missing a part that did not respond this time.

1

A city on the prairie

This story runs on climate-shift, on the USGS gauges and on satellite layers prepared for this page in Earth Engine.

2

Twenty years of new city

The Annual NLCD classifies every 30 m pixel of the United States, every year since 1985.

3

The sponges that went

Woody and herbaceous wetlands, NLCD classes 90 and 95.

4

A hurricane that stalled

NASA's IMERG estimates the rain every half hour from a constellation of satellites; here, summed by day.

5

The bayous past the record

Five USGS gauges with records of 50 to 90 years.

6

A flood that stayed

climate-shift's circle sits between west Houston's two reservoirs.

7

Before, by radar

Sentinel-1 sends its own microwaves and listens for the echo, cloud or not.

8

What radar sees, and what it does not

The same orbit and angle, twelve days later.

9

The land in the circle

climate-shift follows every pixel of the 5 km circle in the Annual NLCD.

10

The rain ahead

What nine climate models project for this place by 2041–2070.

11

El Niño and La Niña

climate-shift's ENSO tabs: the phase of the Pacific, and what each phase has done to the rain here.

12

The app's own words

climate-shift writes a short reading of every circle from its numbers.

13

Where every number came from

Every number on this page comes from a public service or dataset, listed here.

umaterra.com.br · Houston 2017
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What this story does not say

Another story: Katrina, 2005 →

Written with Claude Opus 5.5, by Anthropic, from the numbers Earth Engine, the USGS and climate-shift computed: no number comes from the model. Versão em português.

Notes

  1. Shares of the county's whole area (water included), from the Annual NLCD class of every 30 m pixel. Class 21, "developed, open space", is mostly lawns, parks and golf courses; with it the share is higher, without it lower. Both are shown because figures quoted elsewhere draw the line in different places. Annual NLCD (USGS), 1985–2025; US Census TIGER 2018.
  2. IMERG spreads the rain over ~10 km cells and reads a storm's cores low; rain gauges in Harvey's path recorded more. Days in local time (CDT, UTC−5). GPM IMERG V07, half-hourly; Huffman et al. (2023), NASA.
  3. Flooded: VV backscatter below −16 dB that fell by more than 3 dB since 18 August, on ground that was not water before (JRC occurrence ≤ 50%), after a 30 m focal median. Walls bounce the radar signal back, and water between buildings is nearly invisible. Sentinel-1 GRD, ESA Copernicus; Pekel et al. (2016), JRC Global Surface Water.
  4. climate-shift's projections are the median of nine NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 models (~25 km), 1985–2014 against 2041–2070. "Wettest day" is rx1day, the largest one-day total of each year, averaged. Thrasher et al. (2022), NEX-GDDP-CMIP6.