HORA 3D: Personalized Flood Risk Visualization as an Interactive Web Service

Abstract

We propose an interactive web‐based application to inform the general public about personal flood risks. Flooding is the natural hazard affecting most people worldwide. Protection against flooding is not limited to mitigation measures, but also includes communicating its risks to affected individuals to raise awareness and preparedness for its adverse effects. Until now, this is mostly done with static and indiscriminate 2D maps of the water depth. These flood hazard maps can be difficult to interpret and the user has to derive a personal flood risk based on prior knowledge. In addition to the hazard, the flood risk has to consider the exposure of the own house and premises to high water depths and flow velocities as well as the vulnerability of particular parts. Our application is centered around an interactive personalized visualization to raise awareness of these risk factors for an object of interest. We carefully extract and show only the relevant information from large precomputed flood simulation and geospatial data to keep the visualization simple and comprehensible. To achieve this goal, we extend various existing approaches and combine them with new real‐time visualization and interaction techniques in 3D. A new view‐dependent focus+context design guides user attention and supports an intuitive interpretation of the visualization to perform predefined exploration tasks. HORA 3D enables users to individually inform themselves about their flood risks. We evaluated the user experience through a broad online survey with 87 participants of different levels of expertise, who rated the helpfulness of the application with 4.7 out of 5 on average.