Project Status
This tool is currently in its infancy and it may be buggy or incorrect while I update the information. It is under active development as of October 2026. You can view the progress on GitHub.
About the California Sea Change Atlas
The California Sea Change Atlas (CASCA) was originally envisioned as a recreation of the "Sea the Future" tool summarizing sea level rise and flood visualization tools and an effort to build out a mapping component which did not exist in the original tool, enabling side-by-side view of the different layers from the different source models. However, climate science evolves constantly and research and funding is cyclical; some tools and models have not been updated or maintained, and new ones have cropped up in their place. Climate science also continues to evolve and guidance changes. This project is an effort to keep those tools alive.
CASCA is built on eleventy and hosted on GitHub Pages.
Compare tool
The CASCA Comparison tool is intended as a spiritual successor of the "Sea the Future" tool describing the differences in each model and resource. As with the original, this is not intended to tell you which tool is ultimately the "best" or "worst"; it's only intended to help with determining which tool may be most useful for your given question or project. In addition, the original tool did not have a map that allows the user to flip back and forth between resources for comparison, requiring pulling up the multiple resources side by side. For how the sources themselves were chosen, see About the sources.
Map tool
The CASCA Map is an attempt to collate any resources that provide publically accessible data, primarily from government or openly licensable sources (e.g. in the public domain), onto a single map. As a Californian, I wanted to keep the tool California-centric, both because I call it home and because the data is a little more familiar to me to verify. In an effort to maintain it's longevity, even if I've moved on to other projects, I have hosted this on GitHub with GNU licensing so others may continue the work if desired.
County Profiles tool
The CASCA county profiles tool is a reimplementation of NOAA's Coastal County Snapshots tool, which stopped updating when ENOW dataset updates were paused. This tool recreates an ENOW-like dataset adapting the NOAA methodology, counts at the Census-block level for exposure, and adopts sea level rise values from California's 2024 sea level rise guidance. For more information about the tool, see the about page.
A brief history of the "Sea the Future" Tool
"Sea the Future", originally hosted at seathefuture.org (no longer functional), was a decision-support tool built by the California State Coastal Conservancy and NOAA's Office for Coastal Management to help planners compare 12 sea-level-rise and coastal-flooding visualization tools covering California's coastline. According to the intro and demo video from the California State Coastal Conservancy, "Sea the Future" was born from an exercise called "Lifting the Fog" to collaborate on navigating the different resources available to describe sea level rise tools, ultimately culminating in a tool comparison matrix hosted by Climate Central, and inspired by Gulf TREE, a decsion-support tool for climate change related resources in the Northern Gulf of Mexico.
Unfortunately, tools like these most likely require a significant effort to maintain and update, and projects like these are often supported through grants which are not guaranteed and are not perpetual, especially if certain government administrations deprioritize funding and support for climate science agencies and programs. Although no documentation exists as to why it shut down, I presume the high cost of maintaining these resources, whether funding or effort, ran out; servers were shut down, and resources were quietly sunsetted. As a result, all of the tools here have suffered from linkrot. I have attempted to reconstruct as much as I could through the use of archive links via the WaybackMachine; the last useful snapshot of each URL is included in this section.
A text description of what "Sea the Future" was, and a starting point for this project, is hosted at the Georgetown Climate Center's Adaptation Clearinghouse. As a note, some of the requests from the original video were for "mapping tools side by side" and an address lookup; the CASCA Map component was intended to respond to these feature requests and is not a part of the original tool.
About Me
My name is Peter Modracee and I am a graduate student at the University of San Diego Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering pursuing a Masters of Science in Engineering, Sustainability, and Health. This project was originally inspired by a module of the Sustainable Water course (ESH-511) examining community strategies and tools to address risks stemming from sea level changes and flood risk as a result of climate change. "Sea the Future" was one of the referenced tools but was no longer available; this side project is a result of trying to find out what the original tool was and what purpose it served. This is an attempt to solve a technical problem of parsing different resources, but does not solve the adaptive challenges of creating strategies in response to climate change or sea level rise.
I welcome questions, concerns, suggestions, and feedback on the repo discussions page at GitHub. You may also contact me directly via GitHub, LinkedIn or you may e-mail me at first initial last name at sandiego dot edu.
Affiliations, licenses, and disclosures
This project is a personal project and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by the University of San Diego, the California State Coastal Conservancy, NOAA, FEMA, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), or any of the organizations or agencies mentioned on the resources page or on this site. Descriptions and data from each resource are a good-faith summary compiled from each provider's own public materials, not the original agency content. This site is intended for education and initial research and should not be used as a primary source for research, planning, and/or implementation; always confirm details on the resource's own site and use in accordance with relevant agency, organizational, or official guidance. Data sources and licensing attributions are available directly from each tool.
This site's code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, and its written content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) - see the Licenses & sources page for the full detail, including every third-party library and data source this project depends on.
Privacy & Data Handling
This site does not use cookies, trackers, or persistent local storage, and does not collect personal visitor information. Traffic analytics are collected in aggregate without individual profiling via Cloudflare Web Analytics. Standard infrastructure logs (such as IP addresses used strictly for network security and routing) are processed by Cloudflare and GitHub Pages per their platform privacy standards. If you reach out via e-mail, your address will only be used to respond to your inquiry and is not shared, sold, or added to any mailing list.
To display interactive map data such as base maps, coastal hazard models, and water level projections, the map tool queries external services directly from your browser depending on the layers you activate. When these layers are requested, standard technical connection metadata (including your IP address and viewport coordinates) is transmitted directly to the respective host institutions subject to their data policies. For a full list of services, see the Licenses & sources page.