Tampa Bay 3D Sandbox

On touch: one finger pans, two fingers pinch-zoom and rotate. The compass (bottom-right) resets north. The minimap M lets you pan to a new spot inside the same scene without losing placed objects.

Immersive (first-person)

From the Mode dropdown → Immersive. Walk the scene at human scale. Right-click to enter look mode, left-click to release.

Xbox / generic gamepads work via the Gamepad API — left stick walks, right stick looks, A jumps, triggers sprint, B exits.

Press T to toggle top-down 2D and angled 3D — useful for measuring or comparing layer boundaries.

The Mode dropdown offers Diorama (default angled view), Cross-Section (side-on profile after drawing a cut line), and Immersive (first-person walk).

Top of the Layers panel L. Three pills: 3D Tiles (Google / Cesium photorealistic), Aerial (satellite), Schematic (clean street-map style). Switching preserves your camera and active layers.

Panels

Tools

View & selection

Bookmarks

Open the Layers panel L. Check a layer to add it to the map; the chevron on each row expands its legend, opacity slider, and sub-options.

Water level — including tide, sea level rise, and storm surge scenarios — is the Water Level row in this panel. The sun's date and time are set in the Sun & Time panel N.

Simplified 3D building forms draped over the terrain. Heights come from the OSM height / building:levels tag when present; otherwise a type-aware estimate (residential ~3 m / floor, commercial ~4 m).

Not a survey-grade model and not a complete inventory — unmapped or recently-built structures may be missing. Use Inspect I to see the tags for any building.

Source: OpenStreetMap contributors via the Overpass API.

Colors the terrain by height above sea level (NAVD88). Cooler colors = low ground, warmer = high. Shows where water pools first as levels rise.

Legend: left = scene minimum (often below MLLW), 0 ft = sea-level reference, right = scene peak. The ft/m pill flips display units everywhere.

Lower ≠ guaranteed flooding — drainage, soil saturation, and tide stage all matter. Treat the ramp as one input among several, not a flood map.

Source: NOAA NCEI coastal topobathy elevation models (land and seafloor). If NOAA is unreachable the tool falls back to USGS 3DEP.

The same map lenders, insurers, and floodplain administrators use.

• High Risk — AE / VE. 1% annual chance ("100-year zone"). VE adds wave action ≥ 3 ft on open coast. Mandatory flood insurance for federally-backed mortgages.
• Moderate Risk — Zone X (Shaded). 0.2% annual chance ("500-year zone"). Most U.S. flood losses occur outside the high-risk zones.

Doesn't include: stormwater/drainage flooding, future conditions (no SLR baked in), or per-building risk (the elevation of a specific lowest floor matters as much as the zone).

Source: FEMA NFHL.

Drag the slider or click the value to type an exact number. Values are NAVD88, same datum as the elevation ramp. Or build a scenario from the presets under the slider: pick a tide (low, mean sea level, high, king — the nearest NOAA station's levels), then a future sea level on top of it (NOAA Intermediate-High, 2040–2070), then a storm-surge category (the NHC surge maps' water level at high tide, which replaces the tide). The same levels are drawn as lines in Cross-Section view under Scenarios.

Guided Tour plays four of these scenarios in a row — daily high tide, a 2040 king tide, Category 1 and Category 3 surge — while the camera circles the diorama. Start it from the button under the presets or from the menu under the sandbox logo; nothing advances on its own — Back, Next and End Tour are on the caption card.

Bathtub-model limitations — water rises uniformly, which deliberately ignores terrain channeling (canals, culverts), drainage & pumping (storm systems, seawalls), time dynamics (no fill/drain), rain intensity, and wave/wind/river flow.

Best for sketch scenario planning, stakeholder conversations, and visual risk communication — not engineering or insurance decisions.

Sources: NOAA Tidal Datums, NOAA SLR Technical Report (CSAP 2025 → Intermediate-High), NOAA SLOSH MOM.

Use Inspect I and click any object — buildings show address, footprint area, height; flood zones show the FEMA designation and base flood elevation. Dismiss with another click or Esc.

Two modes: Free (click any two points for the straight-line distance) and Vertical (click a base point, then a point above it, to measure height). Toggle ft / m in the HUD pill. Undo drops the last, Clear wipes all, Esc cancels the current segment.

Sets the sun for the scene — lighting, shadows, and sky follow. Pick a date from the calendar, type a minute-precise time (12h/24h toggle in the field), scrub the sun chart, or use the presets (Now, Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, Solstices). Visual only — it doesn't change water levels.

Water level scenarios (tides, sea level rise, storm surge) live in the Layers panel's Water Level row.

Switch from the Mode dropdown or the "Explore in Cross-Section" button in the Layers panel's Water Level row. Click two points on the diorama to draw the cut line; the view locks to a side-on profile with the elevation ruler on the left.

In the section view:

Water levels: open Scenarios and click a row to show or hide that line; a group heading turns its whole group on or off. Click a line's label to animate the water plane to that elevation, or drag the handle on the ruler to scrub.

Buildings → estimated floor elevations, footprint area, type. Flood zones → FEMA designation and base flood elevation.

Three libraries: 3D Models (houses, vehicles, vegetation, adaptation features like seawalls, mangroves, oyster reefs), Draw (markers, text, shapes, sketch tools, extrude, demolish), and Images (Plan view drops on terrain; Section view overlays on the cut plane).

Placing: click an item to arm it; click the diorama to drop. Ctrl+click stamps a copy. R rotates before placement. Once placed, click to select; drag the gizmo arrows to move, rings to rotate, arcs to tilt. Arrow keys snap tilt to world axes.

K arms the sledgehammer (drag to wipe). The trash icon clears everything. Saved scenes preserve placed objects, drawings, sun and time settings, and basemap.

Click Share to copy a room link. Anyone who opens it joins the live session — cursors, selections, placed objects, water levels, and view changes sync in real time. The first sharer is Captain (owner); they alone control the map location.

A shared room is a live working space, not an archive. Use the Save button (it goes to your Scene Gallery in this browser) or Export Scene (.json) to keep a copy.

• Screenshot (.png) — current view with the active legend overlaid.
• Record Video (.webm) — screen-share recording (use VLC or convert to MP4 if needed).
• Export Scene (.json) — portable scene file with every placed object, drawing, water level, and bookmark. Restore via Scene Gallery → Import scene….
• Export for VR/AR (.glb) — GLB of the diorama + everything in it.

The orange Share button is separate — one click copies the live room URL for real-time collab.

• Elevation — NOAA NCEI coastal topobathy (fallback: USGS 3DEP)
• Buildings — OpenStreetMap via Overpass
• Flood Zones — FEMA NFHL
• Tides — NOAA Tides & Currents
• Sea Level Rise — Tampa Bay CSAP using NOAA Intermediate-High
• Storm Surge — NOAA SLOSH MOM
• Aerial imagery — Esri World Imagery
• 3D photorealistic tiles — Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles / Cesium ion

Data is provided as-is for research and demonstration. Always consult primary sources for planning or regulatory decisions.

Low / Average / High / King tides come from NOAA Tides & Currents for the nearest gauge, converted to NAVD88 in feet.

• Low Tide (MLLW) — Mean Lower Low Water, the long-term average of the lower daily low.
• Average Water Level (MSL) — Mean Sea Level expressed on NAVD88; about −0.3 ft at St. Petersburg, not exactly 0.
• High Tide (MHHW) — Mean Higher High Water.
• King Tide — Highest Astronomical Tide if published, else ~MHHW + 0.6 ft (typical seasonal offset for Tampa Bay).

Source: tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/datums.html — the i button in the legend opens the page for this scene's actual station.

2040 / 2050 / 2060 / 2070 High & King Tides are NOAA's published tidal datums for the nearest station plus the sea level rise projected since the year 2000 by the Tampa Bay Climate Science Advisory Panel (CSAP 2025, Table 1). The values below are the NOAA Intermediate-High scenario for the St. Petersburg tide gauge, which CSAP recommends as the upper bound for planning.

• 2040 — +0.95 ft above the year-2000 baseline
• 2050 — +1.38 ft
• 2060 — +1.94 ft
• 2070 — +2.62 ft

Some of this rise has already happened: these are increases over sea level in 2000, not over today's water level.

Sources: Tampa Bay CSAP, NOAA 2022 SLR Tech Report.

Cat 1–5 surge lines come from the National Hurricane Center's National Storm Surge Risk Maps (version 4), built on NOAA's SLOSH MOM. For each category, SLOSH runs thousands of synthetic hurricanes and keeps the worst-case surge at each point, at high tide — a near-worst-case envelope, not a forecast for any one storm.

The lines are specific to the location you load. Surge is far higher at the head of the bay than on the open Gulf coast, so the same category gives different heights in different places.

• Heights are water-surface elevations in feet NAVD88, shown with a ±1 ft band. NOAA publishes flood depth above ground in 1-ft steps; this tool adds ground elevation to get a water level, averaged over roughly a 1 km area.
• "Over N ft" means the true value is higher: NOAA's maps stop at "more than 20 ft above ground".
• Where NOAA maps no surge within about 3 km (far inland), general Tampa Bay reference ranges are shown instead: Cat 1 ~3–5 ft, Cat 2 ~5–8, Cat 3 ~7–11, Cat 4 ~10–16, Cat 5 ~15–25.

NOAA intends these maps for general awareness at a city or community level, not for assessing an individual property. They do not replace evacuation-zone maps, and do not account for sea level rise, erosion, or future construction. Source: NHC National Storm Surge Risk Maps.

The geologic stack (Surficial Sands, Surficial Aquifer, Confining Layer, Floridan Aquifer) blends three federal sources plus a state refinement:

• USGS DS926 — Hydrogeologic Framework of Florida; defines unit tops/bottoms. pubs.usgs.gov/ds/0926
• NOAA NCEI Topo/Bathy Mosaic — land surface + seafloor the stack sits beneath. ncei.noaa.gov
• USGS NWIS — nearest active monitoring well for the live water-table reading (parameter 72019). waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis
• FDEP / Florida Geological Survey — locally-mapped IAS & SAS that override the regional DS926 where coverage exists. floridadep.gov/fgs