An integrated virtual geographic environmental simulation framework: a case study of flood disaster simulation

Dynamic flood disaster simulation is an emerging and promising technology significantly useful in urban planning, risk assessment, and integrated decision support systems. It is still an important issue to integrate the large assets such as dynamic observational data, numerical flood simulation models, geographic information technologies, and computing resources into a unified framework. For the intended end user, it is also a holistic solution to create computer interpretable representations and gain insightful understanding of the dynamic disaster processes, the complex impacts, and interactions of disaster factors. In particular, it is still difficult to access and join harmonized data, processing algorithms, and models that are provided by different environmental information infrastructures. In this paper, we demonstrate a virtual geographic environments-based integrated environmental simulation framework for flood disaster management based on the notion of interlinked resources, which is capable of automated accumulating and manipulating of sensor data, creating dynamic geo-analysis and three-dimensional visualizations of ongoing geo-process, and updating the contents of simulation models representing the real environment. The prototype system is evaluated by applying it as a proof of concept to integrate in situ weather observations, numerical weather and flood disaster simulation models, visualization, and analysis of the real time flood event. Case applications indicate that the developed framework can be adopted for use by decision-makers for short-term planning and control since the resulting simulation and visualization are completely based on the latest status of environment.