This is amazing, outstanding project! Interestingly, I got it "stuck" when I clicked somewhere random in California (Pope Valley, apparently): https://i.imgur.com/deOsIt2.png
The path, having almost reached the mouth of the Sacramento River, seems to have been captured by the very artificial Mallard Reservoir in Concord, Contra Costa. As to be expected, it seems that anything draining into the Sacramento will do the same.
It's actually an interesting regional issue, because the allocation of Great Lakes water is ultimately governed by a treaty with Canada. Taking water out of the Great Lakes watershed is prohibited without being granted by an exception.
This became a local issue in Waukesha, because the town is on the boundary, so they have two water systems, and the one on the Mississippi side got contaminated. They eventually got permission to connect the whole town to the Lake Michigan side, by agreeing to return all of the drain water back to that side.
This is a lot of fun. As a resident of Maryland, I was mildly surprised to find that the Chesapeake Bay is treated as part of the Atlantic Ocean, instead of an individual waterway in its own right. I suppose this is probably due to the underlying data set, but it doesn't seem right to me.
You're the second person to mention this now! The stopping feature stuff is very tricky and not in the original USGS data, but I can block out Chesapeake Bay the same way that I blocked or the Gulf of Mexico
Cool project - and I like that it uses USGS hydrography data.
They publish all kinds of terrain survey information about the entire USA for free. There's probably enough data to make your own GPS mapping device/app.
Very cool, and feel more real than I expected. A raindrop often ends up to the real "river" and goes down to the sea with it. It revived my appreciation to the physics.
There's a small part of North Dakota (and a teeny part of Montana) that drain into Hudson Bay. This led to the odd fact that these parts of the Midwest USA were for a while British territory (until 1818). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pembina_Region
This is great! I got a chuckle though that this is for the US only, but it shows distance in km instead of miles. I'd love it if we changed to metric but I don't see that happening any time soon.
The United States was one of the original signatories of the Metre Convention [1]. The metric system has been the foundation of all US measures since 1893 [2,3]. School children in the United States have learned both systems for decades. Ford trucks have metric bolts. The US military uses the metric system.
Neat.. I was just in that park last week for a wedding, it was too bad that a lot of the roads were still closed, but it was still amazingly beautiful. Think I've driven over the continental divide about 6 times in the past week, the one east of glacier national park twice and three times when driving through yellowstone to get to teton national forest today. It's just ridiculous up here.
Yes and some evaporates, but I think the tool is mapping the path of water that doesn't leave the water system that way and flows out into a larger body.
Since no one else has done it I will ask for features: sometimes it takes a while for it to determine the route, there is no way to cancel that to go back to trying a new raindrop location
Wish there was a different way to get back to raindrop location instead of closing the existing route. Would prefer some kind of click/tap-state or gesture. More easily noticeable of an inconvenience on an ultrawide screen.
I struggled with this a lot. Originally set that ending overview at the beginning, but was worried that practically a lot of users might miss the main feature. I've heard from a lot of people that they were surprised it went into the 3D view, and I think some people might see the plot and just assume that's it.
The 3D view is cool, but it would be great if you could turn it off. After a few goes, all I wanted to do was quickly look at a bunch of different places - I ended up closing the 3D view and going back to the map view anyway.
Why not simply let users click on the map route preview window and have it expand into the full 2D route view?
The 3D route was truly a delightful experience and exceeded my expectations quite a bit so please don’t add any hurdles in front of this seamless 3D experience or it will lose the magic a lot of us are experiencing! …my 2 cents
It would be an interesting problem to see / solve where in this map would a drop travel the most. By just clicking, I got one that travels from Cavour, South Dakota to Gulf of Mexico over a 3523 Kms journey. I am sure there must be something that is longer!
Edit - some of the routes stop at border of Canada - is this due to lack of dataset?
The longest route in this dataset is almost certainly from Northwest Montana to the Gulf of Mexico; see, eg. the beautiful illustration of watersheds in North America at [1]. Example: [2]
The source of the Missouri River - Brower's Spring apparently - is probably close to the point where it's longest. I can't find it exactly on this map, but have got up to 5790km, from a point just by Yellowstone Airport.
Ha I appreciate you sharing the repo, but if someone is interested in finding a longest route, they should probably just go straight to the data source (USGS NHDPlus data/NLDI API)
This is cool! Did you have some info on this or use some data to find this? I was randomly clicking points on center of US and many were just ending in a nearby lake. I only found a few that ended up in the sea..
Hm, I can no longer reproduce this, but my first click ended 22km away in a reservoir somewhere in the midwestern United States. Colorado maybe? But it wasn't Dillon; everything running into Dillon just passed through. I only mention it because I can't find any references to reservoirs acting as endorheic basins in the midwest.
Is the map loading initially ok then suddenly distorting to become unreadable after a second or two for anyone else? I'm on Firefox, with lots of about:config hacking, particularly preventing canvas being used for fingerprinting, so the website maybe can't handle unavailability of certain features.
Yes, it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/3ec9zpj.jpg ... I don't have a whole lot of custom about:config settings and I tried to disable no-script and ublock origin but no luck.
Great piece of work. But what struck me the most is how little of the real America is left. Everything is basically covered by plowed-under farmland. All it takes is Google earth and a bit sensitivity to what you are looking at. Humanity has really left a giant scar on the face of the earth.
130 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] thread[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watersheds_of_North_America
https://goo.gl/maps/s9Gep775ZLDgddzz7
It's actually an interesting regional issue, because the allocation of Great Lakes water is ultimately governed by a treaty with Canada. Taking water out of the Great Lakes watershed is prohibited without being granted by an exception.
This became a local issue in Waukesha, because the town is on the boundary, so they have two water systems, and the one on the Mississippi side got contaminated. They eventually got permission to connect the whole town to the Lake Michigan side, by agreeing to return all of the drain water back to that side.
They publish all kinds of terrain survey information about the entire USA for free. There's probably enough data to make your own GPS mapping device/app.
https://www.usgs.gov/products/maps/gis-data
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...
And in Montana it's Triple Divide Peak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_(Montana)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
If most of the water collected in underground pools, then eventually we'd have no oceans.
Since no one else has done it I will ask for features: sometimes it takes a while for it to determine the route, there is no way to cancel that to go back to trying a new raindrop location
Wish there was a different way to get back to raindrop location instead of closing the existing route. Would prefer some kind of click/tap-state or gesture. More easily noticeable of an inconvenience on an ultrawide screen.
The 3D route was truly a delightful experience and exceeded my expectations quite a bit so please don’t add any hurdles in front of this seamless 3D experience or it will lose the magic a lot of us are experiencing! …my 2 cents
Edit - some of the routes stop at border of Canada - is this due to lack of dataset?
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/maps-worlds-watersheds/
[2] https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-113.26136901231438...
The code is at https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner/, it would be quite possible to base a solver on that.