Ellicott City has flooded twice in the last decade in ways it hadn't in the previous fifty years. Wilde Lake gets hotter than the rest of the county. So, here's a plain look at why, using numbers from the county's own sources. Though this is just a high school project, I feel your eyes can be opened by the information shown here.
See the hotspot mapAn interactive map of documented flood, heat, and water-quality hotspots across the county (Ellicott City, Wilde Lake, the Route 1 corridor, and the Patapsco lowlands), each with sourcing and a synced, keyboard-navigable list.
Howard County already publishes serious climate and flood data through Climate Forward and its open-data GIS portal. Most residents never see it. Those dashboards were built for planners, not for someone trying to find out whether their own street floods or their own block runs hot. Environmento takes that public data and turns it into something you can read in five minutes and actually use. It won’t replace the county’s official tools. It’s a way to find them, with enough context to know what you’re looking at.
