Visualization of Flooding Using Adaptive Spatial Resolution

Abstract

Flood simulations are vital to gain insight into possible dangers and damages for effective emergency planning. With flexible and natural ways of visualizing water flow, more precise evaluation of the study area is achieved. In this study, we describe a method for flood visualization using both regular and adaptive grids for position-based fluids method to visualize the depth of water in the study area. The mapping engine utilizes adaptive cell sizes to represent the study area and utilizes Jenks natural breaks method to classify the data. Predefined single-hue and multi-hue color sets are used to generate a heat map of the study area. It is shown that the dynamic representation benefits the mapping engine through enhanced precision when the study area has non-disperse clusters. Moreover, it is shown that, through decreasing precision, and utilizing an adaptive grid approach, the simulation runs more efficiently when particle interaction is computationally expensive.

FloodSim: Flood Simulation and Visualization Framework Using Position-Based Fluids

“…By parsing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and extracting significant features, City Maker is flexible enough to provide the required GIS layers to the environment. Furthermore, a particle-based fluids visualization tool [43] is utilized to visualize the environment in 2D. Using this, clarity in otherwise complex-to-comprehend scenarios can be achieved.…”

“…As such information might be incomplete or unavailable, resolution can be decreased to represent an overall absorption for given areas instead of focusing on individual inlets. This is done through utilization of an adaptive grid [43] as discussed earlier, by using a quadtree to divide the study area into grids. By predefining a proper level of depth as required for the study, absorption is computed through averaging the inlets' properties in generated cells.…”

“…Upon initialization of the 2D mapping module [43], the environment and relevant objects are updated per frame. The clouds are set to emit the water particles with given rainfall intensity and direction.…”

City Maker: Reconstruction of Cities from OpenStreetMap Data for Environmental Visualization and Simulations

“…The implementation in [42] provides a mapping engine, which can be used to efficiently visualize depth information for 3D Lagrangian simulations. The tool is used to gain more insight regarding flooding scenarios and, therefore, it was used in our work to demonstrate simulation capabilities of the reconstructed environments City Maker produces.…”