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.