Abstract
In this paper, we present a new type flood simulator for flood risk communication. The characteristics of presented simulator are:(1) Calculation speed of flood flow is very fast;(2) It offers a fully interactive user interface;(3) It provides the property damage assessment based on the simulated results;(4) It visualizes the simulated results with three-dimensional cityscapes. The shallow water equations are solved by using a combination of leapfrog scheme and staggered grid to accelerate the flood flow calculation. Meanwhile we develop an execution sequences controlling function that enable parallel processing the visualization of current state of simulated flow as well as the simulation, and it underlies the interactive user interface. Moreover in order to implement these characteristics, we apply four-dimensional Geographic Information System (4D-GIS), which is suitable to manage and to simulate flood events with 3D geographic data and the simulated time sequence. Through an experiment, presented simulator shows a very promising performance, which would significantly improve the flood damage understanding of society.
