3D Water Tiles

Hydrodynamic software such as 3Di Watermanagement is able to calculate and simulate real-world scenarios and adjust them. This way, water experts can predict and mitigate the impact of pluvial, fluvial and coastal floods, perform climate impact studies and make hydraulic designs of open water channel and sewer networks. 3Di allows to model interactively and visualize the results on two dimensions like maps and cross sections. Often, decision-makers, firefighters or emergency responders experience difficulties by interpreting visual outcomes of hydrodynamic studies correctly, especially during a crisis. To them, the propagation of the flood, water levels or flow patterns make more sense if it’s projected in an 3D-environment. First of all, a 3D representation of the streets, buildings or landmarks allow users to quickly familiarize themselves with the surrounding. Secondly, the visual aspect of water accumulating next to a building supports decision making, such that first responders can quickly assess the severity of the situation and in combination with the buildings if vertical or horizontal evacuation is the best option.

Digital Twins are more often used as the digital equivalent of the actual, physical real-world to serve effectively for practical purposes. In this EU-Horizon project, the data-to-visualization time will be decreased to speed-up the availability of new information if for example the prospects of a propagating flood changes. 3D Tiles is designed for streaming and rendering massive 3D geospatial content such as 3D Buildings but can also be used to deliver renderable hydrodynamic simulation data, such as water levels. Based on the latest meteorological forecasts and ground-truth data, new simulations will be executed which results in updated water levels and flow patterns. 3Di calculates these individual parameters per timestep per calculation cell for the simulation period and processes the results in 2D-formatted raster data such as GeoTIFF or netCDF formats. Due to new developments in this project, the results per timestep are now automatically translated into 3D Water Tiles, following the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. 

The visualization of 3D Water tiles in combination with other 3D tiles like infrastructure, buildings, etc. requires the information to be in the right geospatial projection and datum. The 2D-hydrodynamic simulation output of 3Di are water depths. These water depths are calculated at the centroid of calculation cells while the physics of mass-balance equations are preserved at a high-resolution subgrid level. For correct representation in digital twins, the water depth output needs to be translated in water levels. The translation faces some challenges because the bathymetry of the model can be different from the elevation model used in the digital twin. Especially during crisis if the infrastructure will be demolished by floods and e.g. the elevation of the model will be updated to simulate the obstruction of water due to a collapsed bridge. Rapid processing of 2D hydrodynamic data and elevation data into 3D tiles is required and will be developed in this project to make sure the emergency response service can act adequately based on simulations close to the real-world simulations.

Because of the development 3D Water Tiles from hydrodynamic simulation results, these can be used immediately in 3D-models to be shown in a Digital Twin environment, projected on the SmartDesk directly to end-users.