Developing and testing a web-based platform for visualizing flow in a watershed

Thanks to the rapid development of internet technology and computer hardware, it is now possible to use web services to provide visual simulations of flow field calculation results. Visualization technology can display complex water flow data and the laws that govern water flow through graphical means, and can be used to solve scientific and engineering problems related to water conservancy. In this study, we developed a platform for visualizing flow in a watershed based on a Cesium rendering framework with Browser/Server (B/S) architecture that used isosurface, particles, texture-based, and dynamic flow visualization techniques to visualize scalar field, vector field, and dynamic flow field data. Furthermore, our performance test results indicate that the rendering performance meets the practical application requirements for visualizing large-scale flow fields by employing frame interpolation and viewpoint-based dynamic rendering techniques. The results from testing the water flow visualization platform in the Beijiang River Basin, Guangdong Province, China, demonstrated that the platform performed well on different devices and that the running frame rate reached 50–60 fps. These findings can be used to guide further development and applications of web-side flow field visualization technology.