An immersive approach to visualising the local impact of sea level rise on flood risks

Climate change is a global phenomenon that is frequently described at a global scale using numeric values (e.g. "1.5 degree increase in temperature globally"), diagrams, or maps depicting future scenarios. However, specific local impacts can differ drastically from global changes and understanding them based on those descriptions can be difficult. Therefore, the work presented here proposes an interactive system that visualizes the local consequences of the sea level rise in combination with various flooding scenarios (annual, five, ten, and 100 year flood) for different climate change predictions. The system enables users to explore flood impacts dynamically from the point of view of a pedestrian, offering an alternative to map-based representations. Results from a prelim- inary user study indicate that the system performs similar to map representations in conveying flood-related informa- tion, highlighting its potential as an intuitive and engaging tool for flood risk communication.