Modelled flood extents for Los Santos (Grand Theft Auto V) under IPCC AR5 and AR6 sea level rise scenarios

Modelled flood extents for the fictional city of Los Santos, the setting of Grand Theft Auto V, under IPCC AR5 and AR6 sea level rise scenarios combined with the historical maximum storm surge at the Los Angeles tide gauge. Supporting dataset for Nörenberg, P. and Lantuit, H.: Sea level rise in Los Santos and Los Angeles: a comparative flood analysis using Grand Theft Auto V, Geoscience Communication, 2026. Contents. Flood masks for all 25 scenarios as GeoTIFF rasters and as polygons with areas attached; the scenario table giving sea level rise, storm surge, total still-water level, flooded area and percentage of land area; a response curve of flooded area against still-water level from 0 to 10 m in 0.05 m steps, so any revised projection can be read off without re-running the model; the 31 shoreline points that fix the sea level datum; and the script that applies the calibration. What is deliberately not here. The terrain this study is built on is a community reproduction of a proprietary Rockstar Games asset, and the satellite-style basemap is a capture of the same game world. Neither is ours to redistribute, and neither is the calibrated elevation model derived from them. They are therefore excluded. The calibration constants in the README are sufficient to reproduce the elevation model from the source mesh. Calibration. Elevations in the rasterised mesh are in arbitrary units; elevation_m = (raw_pixel_value + 333.2486218064515) × 1.13414841. Cell size 1.0524 m. Land above mean sea level 44.4000 km². Storm surge 1.591 m. Two cautions. The grid has no coordinate reference system and cannot have one, because the coordinates are a video game; every layer shares one grid and overlays exactly, and GIS software will correctly report an undefined spatial reference. Do not assign a real-world CRS. Units are metres. Separately, the plane outside the rasterised mesh is stored as exactly 0.0, which after calibration reads as a spurious +377.95 m plateau over 37.7 % of the extent, and must be excluded explicitly. On the numbers. These are static, or "bath-tub", inundation areas: land lying below a given still-water level, assuming hydraulic connectivity to the ocean. They are not predictions of where water would reach during a particular event, and they overestimate extent relative to a hydrodynamic model.