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.