A 3D virtual geographic environment for flood representation to promote risk communication

Risk communication aims to develop a shared understanding of disaster risks among stakeholders, which will enhance public awareness and enable them better react to an emergency. However, there are three crucial challenges for geoinformation-based flood risk communication: spatiotemporal simulation, fast computation, and effective representation. Existing studies overemphasize specialized numerical modelling, which makes the process time-consuming and the professional output difficult to understand and use by non-research stakeholders. In this article, we propose a 3D virtual geographic environment for flood representation to promote risk communication, based on cellular automata (CA)- based flood modelling, parallel computation, and web visualization in 3D. Finally, a section of the Rhine river in Bonn, Germany, is selected for experiment analysis. The experiment results show that the proposed framework improves the efficiency of flood simulation while reducing the complexity and difficulty from numerical modelling to 3D representation. The intuitive flood scene in 3D is beneficial for promoting flood risk communication and is particularly helpful for participants without direct experience of floods to understand its spatiotemporal process.

风险沟通旨在构建各利益相关方对灾害风险的共识，以此提升公众风险认知，助力其更妥善地应对突发紧急状况。然而，基于地理信息的洪水风险沟通面临三大核心挑战：时空模拟、快速计算与高效可视化呈现。现有研究过度侧重专业数值建模，导致流程耗时冗长，且生成的专业成果难以被非科研类利益相关方理解与应用。本文基于元胞自动机（Cellular Automata, CA）洪水模拟、并行计算与三维Web可视化技术，提出一种用于洪水态势呈现的三维虚拟地理环境，以推动洪水风险沟通工作。最终选取德国波恩市境内的一段莱茵河河段开展实验分析。实验结果表明，所提框架提升了洪水模拟效率，同时降低了从数值建模到三维可视化呈现的复杂度与实施难度。直观的三维洪水场景有助于推动洪水风险沟通，尤其能帮助未亲历洪水的受众理解洪水的时空演进过程。