The Weather Game

How do we understand complex data and comprehend uncertainty?  That's just the question that the UK Met Office are trying to solve with an attractive on-line casual game: The Weather Game, playable on their website for the next month.

The game present players with an imaginary (actually rather trite, but no matter) scenario and a variety of visualizations of weather predictions from which future actions need to be determined.  How well you do in deciding your future action is obviously, to some extent, a reflection on how clearly data is presented to you and how uncertainty in that data is mediated, so that it is possible to take into account in decision making.  Interesting resonances here for interrogation of climate change predictions. I wonder what a similar approach to comprehension of the UK Climate Impacts Programme UKCP09 models of future climate change based on different emission scenarios, might reveal, particularly in the ability of policy makers to comprehend and adapt.  Well, this is a long way from games based visualization of landscape and heritage, but it is visualization, and after all what we are about here is trying to better understand landscape scale data. Recommendation: take a break from Crysis2, play the Met Office game, explore different visualizations and make a contribution to a useful piece of research at the same time.

Flood Modelling and Visualisation

Continuing to explore the possibilities of using PixelActive's CityScape for modelling flooding I've gone back to some old data documenting particularly impressive floods on the River Trent, in Leicestershire, in December 1954.

This wonderful RAF air-photograph, taken at about 11am on 15th December shows the Trent in full flood, with substantial overbank flooding affecting both the north and south of the river and the area to the south (Lockington Marshes) almost completely inundated.  A south-bound express train can be seen, most visibly by its train of steam, about to cross the Trent.  But how deep was the flooding.  Some while ago we calculated the extent of the floods by comparing the photographic evidence with recent lidar terrain data.

Lidar Terrain Model.

"Flooded" lidar (in blue) superimposed on air-photograph.

Together, these two allow us to duplicate the photographically documented flooding by selective colouring of the lidar data. By our estimates the river level at Lockington was up to 1.2m above its usual winter level.  So what about visualisation?  Using Cityscape and the lidar DTM (exported as a binary grid from ArcGIS, which overcomes the GeoTiff issues) it is possible to flood the terrain to roughly duplicate the level of inundation of December 1954.

Floods of 1955 simulated in CityScape

Moving from the 2D map view CityScape allows some nice 3D visualisation of the extent and character of these floods.

Looking north-east from an earthwork platform which  

probably served as a livestock refuge.

Overlooking Sawley Cliff Farm, isolated by floodwaters.

Sawley Cliff Farm was abandoned not long after the 1954 floods and the whole area remains prone to periodic flooding.  The Lockington marshes have formed the study area for intensive research into river channel formation processes and the relationship between archaeology and dynamic river systems. Does visualisation such as this contribute to such studies? I'm not sure at present, although it may  at least open up the area to other, more visually oriented audiences.  Of course these visualisations are simply the here and now (well almost), perhaps more interesting would be to recreate the river-scape of 2000 years ago, channel movement, vegetation, environment and settlement, and then explore the impact of the dynamic River Trent on that.

Climate Change, Archaeology and City Modelling

I've been continuing to explore Pixel Active's excellent CityScape, particularly as its focus on urban modelling takes me into new realms of visualisation.  The ability to import OpenStreetMap mapping and SketchUp models makes rapid visualisation of many cities easy.  Below, is a quick (really quick, about 10 minutes work) model of a corner of my old home, York.  Interesting, if a little quirky and certainly in need of more work.

On adding the River Ouse to my rough landscape, it struck me that CityScape's global water level functions would allow me to flood the landscape. Memories of York's dramatic winter 2000/2002 floods prompted the following crude visualisations of somewhat more water around Clifford's Tower than I remember.

Although this crude visualisation lacks an underlying terrain model, and so any pretence of credibility, it strikes me that this function might be adapted to look at one impact of future climate change in river valleys; flooding. Climate change and cultural heritage has concerned me and other colleagues elsewhere and with other hats on, but perhaps visualisation might bring home the potential real impact of climate change on cultural heritage more than words alone.