Rebuilding Climate Risk: SPHERE, DuckDB, and the Modern GIS Stack with Troy Schmidt

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Troy Schmidt, a 20-year GIS developer and the creator of SPHERE, an open-source Python package that runs FEMA's HAZUS flood risk methodology on GeoParquet and DuckDB.

Troy dives into why depth damage functions are simpler than the engineering language suggests, and how the gap between the HAZUS methodology and the HAZUS software pushed him to build a Python-first alternative. He shares the moment he realized the data and the science were already public, and that the only thing missing was a modern stack to run it on.

The conversation also covers the three types of flooding most people lump together (coastal, riverine, and pluvial), why pluvial risk is the gap that nobody insures, and what an open core model means for geospatial science.

Finally, Troy walks through his cloud-native discovery process, from Wherobots and Earthmover webinars to DuckDB and vectorized math, and explains why turning legacy methodology into a Python package unlocks deployment patterns that were never possible before.

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Connect with Troy Schmidt:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mr-troy-schmidt/
SPHERE on GitHub: https://github.com/Niyam-Projects/sphere

CHAPTERS:
00:00:00 – Intro
00:01:35 – Welcome and Troy's 20-Year GIS Journey
00:04:17 – The Risk Modeling Landscape
00:07:25 – Coastal, Riverine, and Pluvial Flooding
00:11:05 – HAZUS Methodology vs. HAZUS Software
00:16:05 – Site-Specific vs. Census Block Analysis
00:18:05 – Building SPHERE: A Python Package for Risk
00:21:25 – Cloud-Native, GeoParquet, and DuckDB
00:25:05 – Why the Methodology Was Simple All Along
00:27:05 – Discovery: Webinars, Wherobots, and the Modern Stack
00:29:35 – Spatial as a Boundary Data Type
00:32:35 – The Open Core Model and the Bridge to Modern GIS
00:38:05 – Ensemble Models and What's Next for Climate Risk
00:39:35 – Where to Find Troy and SPHERE

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