Iowa Flood Center

Web Page: http://myweb.uiowa.edu/demir/project_google_soc.htm

Mailing List: http://www.iowafloodcenter.org/newsletter-signup/

The Iowa Flood Center (IFC) was established at the University of Iowa to improve flood forecasting and mitigation understanding—all with the goal of trying to prevent future flooding or lessen its effects along Iowa's major waterways. The IFC has established several community-based programs to improve flood monitoring and prediction in Iowa. IFC is actively engaged in flood projects in several Iowa communities and employs several graduate and undergraduate students participating in flood-related research.

Some the project activities at IFC are design and development of information systems, large scale data management, interactive geospatial visualization, flood forecasting models, augmented reality applications, and rich web and mobile applications.

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Some Project Screenshots

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Projects

• Augmented Reality Application for Interactive Flood Simulation The aim of this project is to create a web-based augmented reality application using HTML5 technologies for an interactive flood simulation. Users will place encoded paper markers on a board, each representing an object such as a house, car, bridge, levee, dam etc. A webcam is then used to detect and track these markers in real-time. 3D virtual objects will be overlaid on these markers on the screen. A height-map terrain can be loaded by the user to represent the actual terrain condition of a specific place and to provide more interesting structures for flooding to occur. Additional sculpting of the terrain is possible using special “sculpting markers” which can either bump or dent a terrain area. A rainfall event can then be initiated which will flood the area according to variables such as rainfall amount, drainage rate and evaporation rate. Other sources of water can be created by the user using markers which represent water sources, or by removing water-holding structures such as levees or dams. The flood simulation will interact with the 3D virtual objects in the scene.
• Flood Inundation Simulator on Google Maps using WebGL This project intends to simulate flood inundation using WebGL on Google maps. The project will feature interactive tools like zoom, navigation etc. The project will also analyze data and display obtained statistics. The simulation will be in real-time and realistic.