Visualization of Object‐Centered Vulnerability to Possible Flood Hazards

Abstract

AbstractAs flood events tend to happen more frequently, there is a growing demand for understanding the vulnerability of infrastructure to flood‐related hazards. Such demand exists both for flood management personnel and the general public. Modern software tools are capable of generating uncertainty‐aware flood predictions. However, the information addressing individual objects is incomplete, scattered, and hard to extract. In this paper, we address vulnerability to flood‐related hazards focusing on a specific building. Our approach is based on the automatic extraction of relevant information from a large collection of pre‐simulated flooding events, called a scenario pool. From this pool, we generate uncertainty‐aware visualizations conveying the vulnerability of the building of interest to different kinds of flooding events. On the one hand, we display the adverse effects of the disaster on a detailed level, ranging from damage inflicted on the building facades or cellars to the accessibility of the important infrastructure in the vicinity. On the other hand, we provide visual indications of the events to which the building of interest is vulnerable in particular. Our visual encodings are displayed in the context of urban 3D renderings to establish an intuitive relation between geospatial and abstract information. We combine all the visualizations in a lightweight interface that enables the user to study the impacts and vulnerabilities of interest and explore the scenarios of choice. We evaluate our solution with experts involved in flood management and public communication.