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River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
- zanethomas 5y agocool
- celim307 5y agoWow I clicked thinking the concept was neat enough on its own but the execution was engaging and informative. This is great
- fillskills 5y agoThis is simply amazing. I expect to spend hours on this with the kids. Thanks!
- dvt 5y agoThis 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 https://i.imgur.com/deOsIt2.png
- jacquesm 5y agoIs there a lake there in real life?
- truculent 5y agoIs that within The Great Basin[^1]? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watersheds_of_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watersheds_of_North_America
- mannykannot 5y agoThe 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. https://goo.gl/maps/s9Gep775ZLDgddzz7 https://goo.gl/maps/s9Gep775ZLDgddzz7
- samlearner 5y agoThis should be fixed now!
- potatosalad1 5y agoThis is very cool. It would be nice if it showed how long the path is, so you could play a mini game to try and find the longest path.
- pianom4n 5y agoIt shows the total length in the top right corner.
- mikewarot 5y agoA friend of mine has a house set on one of the boundaries, the west half of his roof empties into the Mississippi, the east half into Lake Michigan.
- tigerlily 5y agoHe could call his house "the Watershed".
- spookthesunset 5y agoThat is pretty cool to visualize in your head
- analog31 5y agoWaukesha? 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.
- rsfinn 5y agoThis 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.
- jrootabega 5y agoYeah, ecologically the Chesapeake is very distinct.
- samlearner 5y agoYou'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
- samlearner 5y agoThis has been added a stopping feature as of the last update.
- howzitallworkeh 5y agoCool 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. https://www.usgs.gov/products/maps/gis-data https://www.usgs.gov/products/maps/gis-data
- jubjubbird 5y agoAnd here's a USGS site that delineates a watershed from any point on a stream: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/streamstats-streamflow-statistics-and-spatial-analysis-tools https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...
- perrohunter 5y agothis is brilliant
- flakiness 5y agoVery 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.
- foota 5y agoI chose a spot in Colorado, the result was rather disappointing: https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-105.56967021444078&lat=37.726147583411205 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-105.56967021444078...
- dboreham 5y agoThere'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pembina_Region
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoWhich part is that? I can't find it on the map. Just want to see the twisty windy path.
- foota 5y agoI think it must be northern?
- dboreham 5y agoYes, anywhere that drains to the Red River, which flows north. The Louisiana Purchase you'll recall only covers land that drains into the Mississippi.
- mastax 5y agoNortheastern North Dakota. The website just shows it stopping at Canada since it's based on USGS data.
- dboreham 5y agoSee: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_Concession https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_Concession And in Montana it's Triple Divide Peak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_(Montana) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_(Montana)
- NortySpock 5y agoFun, even shows you the short rivers that drain into the Great Salt Lake of Utah
- dboreham 5y agoIt says my lawn is 5230km from the Gulf of Mexico. Not quite the furthest you can go though -- that's 200km east of here, I think.
- Urgo 5y agoThis 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.
- mulmen 5y agoThe 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
- perryizgr8 5y agoIt will happen if we keep making new things (like this tool) that use km instead of miles.
- samlearner 5y agoThat's the form the data came in and when it came time to convert it, I figured it might be better not to.
- slacktide 5y agoAllow me to present Triple Divide Peak, from whence you may urinate simultaneously into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_(Montana) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Divide_Peak_(Montana)
- bostonsre 5y agoNeat.. 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.
- sschueller 5y agoCool but doesn't a large amount get absorbed and end up in ground water pools etc?
- yaitsyaboi 5y agoYes 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.
- cush 5y agoWater goes through the water cycle. Even if it's absorbed by the ground, it eventually leads to collection, evaporation, and precipitation again. If most of the water collected in underground pools, then eventually we'd have no oceans.
- vmception 5y agoAccolades! 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.
- chinathrow 5y agoI love it. Another feature request would be to not fly the path but just show the plotted flow.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoYou can cancel the animation part by clicking the close button on the top right panel.
- samlearner 5y agoI 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.
- leoedin 5y agoThe 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.
- samlearner 5y agoHmm ok, there's a fix here and it's probably something to do with a timer and a way to opt out, I'll work on this.
- kcvv 5y agoIt 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?
- Sharlin 5y agoThe 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] [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/maps-worlds-watersheds/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/maps-worlds-watersheds/ [2] https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-113.26136901231438&lat=48.47374874798547 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-113.26136901231438...
- carl_dr 5y agoThe 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. The code is at https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner/ https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner/, it would be quite possible to base a solver on that.
- samlearner 5y agoHa 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)
- TimonKnigge 5y agoYou can click in Northern Montana for longer routes, e.g. Browning, Montana gives about 5587km.
- kcvv 5y agoThis 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..
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoI'd love to see something like this for the rest of the world
- eganist 5y agoHm, 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.
- sleavey 5y agoIs 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.
- vesinisa 5y agoFor me this worked on Firefox without issue.
- asymmetric 5y agoSame setup, lots of weird glitches.
- Black101 5y agoYes, it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/3ec9zpj.jpg 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.
- sodality2 5y agoAllow "extract canvas data". It breaks a lot of graphics visualizations within FF.
- sodality2 5y agoAllow "extract canvas data". It breaks a lot of graphics visualizations within FF.
- ageofwant 5y agoGreat 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.
- rafael_benatti 5y agoI'm not a programmer, but as an environmental engineering student that was an astonishing work. Congratulations :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fouc 5y agoUnconsciously I expected that the drop would always end up in larger bodies of water. So I was surprised when it went from a creek to a river and to a lake, and then back to a creek. We're probably missing some groundwater visualization :)
- nycdatasci 5y agoI was curious to see what happens to rain in Death Valley (below sea level). https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-116.84629411503326&lat=36.21772489201729 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-116.84629411503326...
- mekkkkkk 5y agoReally impressive! Feature suggestion 1: Maybe you could pre-render a grid of rain drops to get a nice overview of the flow paths and how they converge. Would be cool and interesting. Feature suggestion 2: It might be possible to include man-made structures along the path, and to include a small delay when the water is halted by dams/power stations/whatevers.
- codingdave 5y agoAt a high level, I really like this. Some UX concerns are all that stop it from being amazing: - The mouse should be a pointer, not a hand. Not only is that the expectation when an element is interactive, but it helps with precision clicking. - The map almost made me sick when it starting moving. It needs to be slower and smoother. You already let people speed it up, but start slower. - Dragging the map should be possible. I wanted to scroll back to something that had moved off-screen, and the map dragged a few pixels, then snapped back. If it is supposed to be draggable, let it drag. If not, don't let a drag start and then snap it back. But really, those concerns aside, this is a nice tool.
- samlearner 5y agoHey, thanks for the feedback. I actually struggled on what to do with the cursor, since the map is draggable (when not at min zoom level) prior to a click and the default mapbox cursor is denoting that. On balance, I think you're right that a default cursor might be better. Re: interaction during the run, I thought about allowing you to interact and just pausing the run while you do, but thought that too many people would interact accidentally, pause the run and then not understand that they had to click somewhere to resume. It's a feature that would technically be ideal, but practically would throw a lot of people off-track with incidental interaction I think (I had this same issue with the decision to start the run right away instead of giving the user and overview at the beginning. Technically, I think it would be ideal, practically, I think a lot of people could miss the main feature of the site altogether). Speed-wise, I've already slowed it down a good amount from the original iteration, if you can believe that, but I could take it down a little more. There's a weird kind of balance in perceptual speed between camera height and true speed, so I've tried to not give a user full control over speed/zoom, because most options are very bad. I can, at least, take the base speed down a little, and maybe give more precise speed control than what's there. Fundamentally, though, I don't want the default setting to take ten minutes for a run, and I also want you to really be able to see the mountains and canyons.
- caf 5y agoYou could make it pause the run when moving the map around, the automatically continue if it's left alone for N seconds, where N is probably around 5.
- homero 5y agoThat's cool. I didn't know MapBox had 3D like Google Earth
- williesleg 5y agoAmazing but wrong. Most water goes down into the earth. Fucking waste of time.
- thinker5555 5y agoThat's was pretty cool. I had a weird thing going on at first where the map data seemed really old, especially when I was at about "city" level. Interchanges and neighborhoods that I know that have been there since at least 2002 were nowhere to be found. It wasn't until I zoomed way in and then back out again did the map change and they showed up.
- shireboy 5y agoReally neat tool. Reminds me of a favorite quote: Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. - A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- graderjs 5y agoIt's pretty nuts to me that a raindrop that falls in Crow Agency, Montana will drain into the Gulf of Mexico!!! :p :) xx
- Infernal 5y agoI wonder how long that journey takes? Assuming no evaporation of our sample drop.
- kempbellt 5y agoNapkin math. Longest run I've seen (posted in another comment above) starting in NW Montana: https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-113.26136901231438&lat=48.47374874798547 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-113.26136901231438... 5570 km (3461 miles) Rivers fluctuate between 3 to 15 mph on average (quick Googling). At an average of 3mph: ~48 days 15mph: ~9.6 days 7mph: ~20.6 days I'm sure the time of year you decide to run the experiment would change the results pretty drastically.
- RickJWagner 5y agoWow. Place a drop in central Wyoming, watch that one!
- kpt 5y agoThis is cool, i like this, its made my lunch - A Brit
- Arcane_NH 5y agoRequest for enhancement. Add the flow of the Great Lakes. Modeling Lake Michigan near Chicago may be difficult, but everything else should eventually flow over Niagara Falls and through the St. Lawrence into the Atlantic.
- hirundo 5y agoI live near the Continental Divide. I dropped a drop in Datil, NM, which is a few miles east of the divide, and it went west. But isn't the Continental Divide defined as the line at which water drains east or west? Is the app mistaken, is my definition wrong, or what?
- macksd 5y agoThere are multiple places where the divide forks and then joins back together, and even then there are other exceptions. If you live near it, I wouldn't visualize it as a single point, but as a general shift in overall trends.
- umanwizard 5y agoI guess check and see which way the water flows next time you get a big rainstorm :)
- sm4rk0 5y agoSaw some "BLM" forests along the The Tongue River. For the curious that's acronym for "Bureau of Land Management".
- mnw21cam 5y agoI can't see anyone else commenting this here yet - I just get a blank white screen, both on Firefox and Chromium. And no, I haven't disabled Javascript for it. Any ideas?
- macksd 5y agoThis really illustrates to me how important the artificially colored overlays are. As river names change, I assume the river I'm tracking is merging with a larger river. And yet even when I know it's coming, I'm really struggling to spot the other river before we merge.
- davidw 5y agoHaving it always start with a 'city' is a bit weird in places in the west. I tested it east of Lake Abert in Oregon and it calls it 'Lakeview'. The random location is easily an hour drive from Lakeview. For a scenic trip, start it near the 'headwaters' of the Owyhee river in SE Oregon, SW Idaho or Northern Nevada, which gets you the Owyhee, Snake and Columbia rivers.
- dkarl 5y agoThe Great Basin is interesting to explore. I clicked in Eureka, Utah, and the route ended 23km away in a tiny lake called Gadwall Pool.
- scottndecker 5y agoThis is outstanding. Great job. Can't wait to show the kids when they wake up to better explain the continental divide here in Colorado.
- MetallicCloud 5y agoOne thing which I suppose isn't surprising, but still was amazing to see at scale, is I put a drop in Colorado that ended up in the Gulf of Mexico. As the camera followed the path, it's nothing but farms, with the odd city sprinkled in. I got bored and left in Nebraska, but I imagine it's like that the whole way. It's obvious it takes a lot of land to feed everyone, but to see it like that really drove it home.
- mason55 5y agoAnother neat thing about the eastern half of Colorado is the division between the Platte/Missouri and the Arkansas. A small difference in starting point has a huge impact on the route you travel to get to the Mississippi.
- cpascal 5y agoDepending on where you placed that drop in Colorado it also could've ended up in the Pacific. The continental divide is in Colorado and all water west of the divide will eventually drain into the Pacific and all water east will drain to the Atlantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Divide_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Divide_of_the_Amer...
- mikeurbach 5y agoI've been enjoying placing a drop right along the divide and seeing which way it goes. For example, up near Lenawee Mountain (aka A-basin). I've also noticed that up there, sometimes there is no route to either ocean. I guess it ends up in a high-alpine catchment and stays on the divide.
- garborg 5y agoAnother fun, if more subtle divide is right around Hibbing, MN -- step west and water flows down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, step north and water flows up to Hudson Bay, step southeast and water flows through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4206243,-93.0430116,12.7z https://www.google.com/maps/@47.4206243,-93.0430116,12.7z
- 5y ago
- dmd 5y agoWhat does it mean when it says "Unable to find a flow path for [city, state]"? I've gotten this a few times in New Mexico.
- davidw 5y agoIt means the drop hits the ground and evaporates or soaks into the sand, I guess?
- neovive 5y agoWow! Very cool use of Svelte JS.
- bernardv 5y agoVery nicely done. What would be cool is the ability to switch from the terrain view to one showing height contours. Is overland runoff path hydrologically correct or are you essentially following stream flow. In any case, this would be a great exhibit in a first hydrology class.
- pokot0 5y agoVery cool! Now let's find 2 drops, no more than 1 meter apart, one going to the atlantic, the other on the pacific.
- boringg 5y agoNo clue one the true value of this aside from scratching an interest. Either way very cool.
- Lendal 5y agoEducational. The thing that strikes me is that the reasons why we're in an extinction event are not what most people think. I used to think it was due to cities or suburban sprawl. Not true. This tool shows it's farmland. A high percentage of the land you pass through on this tool is farmland. There are no wilderness areas anymore.
- boringg 5y agoThats true however the reason we have a lot of farmland is to feed people in the cities. It's a collective system that is putting pressure everywhere on all of the global resources...
- riazrizvi 5y agoI think you’ll get more traction with this if you speed up the analysis. Probably easiest done by determining an interpolation grid, fill it with values, and return nearest neighbor as the result. Strictly speaking it could still be just as accurate as the uninterpolated approach, since when a raindrop falls, winds could place the drop on the ground some distance away from its release point.
- toss1 5y agoVery cool! Is there a way to put down a grid of raindrops in an area and display their paths from above? It'd be a great way to visualize watersheds. Another (probably huge?) enhancement might be to calculate and display typical travel times along those routes. Nice work - keep it up!
- chrisMyzel 5y agoBeautiful idea - unfortunately it does load forever for the calculation to compelete on the website(at the moment). Found out about the city of Sibley, Minnesota now by Wikipedia and it seems pretty flat xD
- beached_whale 5y agoI remember seeing tools like this in the past, used by governments for flood modelling and other activities, but one of the interesting things at the time(not sure about now) was that the elevation data wasn't granular enough in some cases water went uphill. Still good for modelling but you needed humans to interpret.
- Dah00n 5y agoPalisade, Minnesota to Gulf of Mexico is quite the trip!
- mec31 5y agoCut Bank, Montana to Gulf of Mexico is also quite a ride!
- gregors 5y agoVery cool stuff! I saw talk regarding a similar idea several years back at Strangeloop - check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4z-uSMhvVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4z-uSMhvVM
- dev_tty01 5y agoReally nice work. However, I would really love to have a no animation option. Just show me the route from the continental view. I pretty much have to reload to get it back to the starting point reliably. Fun to click into the animation, but not every time. Thanks for putting this up!
- sillysaurusx 5y ago+1 for the no-animation option. It takes me at least 10 seconds between each attempt. Love the visualization!
- spideymans 5y agoThis has to be one of the coolest things I've seen on HN :)
- ryanmarsh 5y agoPretty nice. I know the hydrology of my area pretty well. I'm not sure if they're using USGS hydrology maps because a water droplet on either side of two water sheds flows to the nearest river by distance, not how things actually flow, but it's pretty close.
- mosseater 5y agoError code on your page! Oh no. Looks like you hit some limit on vercel
- thoughtpeddler 5y agoThis is so cool. Wow. Thank you for building this!
- thatcat 5y agook but most rain ends up evaporated or as ground water..
- kibibyte 5y agoHey this is really awesome. I think I found an edge case though https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-122.10358604021484&lat=42.949895300902995 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-122.10358604021484... :) > There are no rivers flowing into or out of the lake; the evaporation is compensated for by rain and snowfall at a rate such that the total amount of water is replaced every 250 years.
- fruityrudy 5y agoWhat is web traffic like? Do you pay mapbox?
- sinuhe69 5y agoWow! I dropped a raindrop in Seneca Nebraska and it travels 3300 km to the Gulf of Mexico. I believe my raindrop will never reach the ocean What an incredible journey! I wonder if any human has actually traveled this path? https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-100.85192070321573&lat=42.11136503467114 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-100.85192070321573...
- trisomy21 5y agoThis is awesome.
- petrocrat 5y agoIt seems like it hangs or fails when processing the Genessee River watershed path.