Climate Impact Visualization Tools using 3D City for Community-Based Planning and Outreach

To build a climate-smart and resilient nation, we need to foster a climate-literate public that understands its vulnerabilities to a changing climate and makes informed decisions. A core component of this challenge is to develop simple, intuitive and high-impact visualizations of climate data--data that is and will be made available through the President’s Climate Data Initiative--for education and outreach activities. Intelligent Automation Inc., together with Center for GIS (Towson University), is developing the Virtual 3D City Communication and Outreach Management System (COMS) Web portal. The Web portal will be home to education and outreach products created from visualizing existing storm surge and coastal inundation datasets from climate models (e.g. SLOSH, ADCIRC) in the popular Unity game engine. We are developing a flexible Unity SDK plugin that can create virtual 3D city models for any coastal town from USGS elevation data, point cloud LiDAR data and crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data. Using our COMS portal, local planners and communities can visualize scientifically computed water levels in Unity to understand the effect of the storm surges and inundation. The visualizations can be recorded and distributed through social media to communicate and educate communities and policy makers about coastal area vulnerabilities and climate-preparedness.