Dynamic visualisation of storm surge flood routing based on three-dimensional numerical simulation

Storm surge flood risk management and mitigation is one of the crucial concerns of the municipalities of coastal areas. The spatial and temporal distribution of hydrological information of floods could be obtained based on computational fluid dynamics simulation. One- or two-dimensional mathematical models, which may fail to simulate the storm surge flood with radically changing characters, are commonly used by investigators. Meanwhile, numerical simulation results may be intricate for people with limited professional knowledge. This study aims at the creation of a three-dimensional (3D) visualisation of the flood routing process, which can be used to raise awareness of flood risk without waiting for real floods to occur. The numerical simulation is conducted based on the 3D unsteady k-epsilon mathematical model combined with the volume of fluid established in this work. The dynamic visualisation is realised in a 3D urban scenario utilising the scalar field visualisation techniques, texture mapping technique and smoothed particle hydrodynamics method. The case study demonstrates that 3D visualisation could be an effective tool for presenting the dynamic changes of hydrological information visually and realistically.