Online Map Service Provides Detailed Flood Mapping

OS OnDemand, Ordnance Survey’s online map service, has been a valuable asset to the British Environment Agency during this winter’s UK flooding, providing millions of households and businesses with access to detailed flood mapping. The storms that affected Britain from December 2013 onwards, causing widespread flooding in many areas of the country, led to a surge in users accessing the enhanced flood maps from the Environment Agency website.

The online service OS OnDemand has supported access to flood maps with 20 million interactions in January, rising to nearly 30 million in February as the storms continued. On the single busiest day the service delivered 4.2 million transactions.

The national mapping authority’s online service, built to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, streams consistently styled mapping, based on Ordnance Survey’s OS VectorMap product family, direct into Environment Agency’s flood mapping application. The detailed and up-to-date map backdrop, combined with Environment Agency flood data, enables users to quickly identify the risk and extent of flooding and see how it is likely to affect them, their homes and their businesses.

The Environment Agency has created three sets of online maps for the public covering the risk of flooding from rivers and the sea, from reservoirs, as well as from surface water, which affects up to 3 million properties across the country. The interactive maps are delivered via OS OnDemand, ensuring that the flood modelling analysis, from Environment Agency, is easily available to all and information on flood risk can be seen by the public on web and mobile devices.

Vital information

Julian Cooper, OS OnDemand Service Manager, said it’s clear how the Environment Agency’s flood maps service, supported by Ordnance Survey’s robust online service, OS OnDemand, has helped to provide hundreds of thousands of people with better information in coping with flooding and the risk of flooding. OS OnDemand has enabled the Environment Agency to effectively display vital information in a clear and accessible way irrespective of the platform.

It is estimated that one in six homes in England is at risk of flooding. Therefore Ordnance  Survey urges people to check if they are at risk by accessing the flood maps, and sign up to free river and coastal flood warnings, by visiting the Environment Agency website.

OS OnDemand is a web map tile service, delivering rasterised data over the Internet directly to organisations, wherever and whenever it's needed. The service is platform agnostic and reduces the need to manage and store large amounts of data and provides instant access to the latest Ordnance Survey data. Visit Ordnance Survey’s website to find out more.

To access the flood maps, visit the Environment Agency website.

Find guide on being flood ready here.