Combination of Web Programming and DAN3D to Generate Interactive Plots for Debris Flow Hazard Assessment

In order to mitigate the potential damage from debris-flow hazards, the debris-flow hazard assessment is conducted to quantify the risk of landslide occurrence and assign potential levels of damage to surrounding buildings. DAN3D (Three-Dimensional Dynamic Analysis), a 3D numerical model for debris-flow simulation, has been widely used to conduct the debris-flow hazard assessment by computing the magnitudes of debris-flow characteristics, such as the velocity, depth, and volume. DAN3D software presents the results on a map plot that shows the magnitude of debris-flow characteristics over the inundated areas at a particular simulation time. These plots neither provide the exact values of debris-flow characteristics at a specific location nor compute the area and the width of debris-flow. Furthermore, a static image can be inconvenient for visualizing the changes in the debris-flow characteristics through time. Therefore, the present study created a program to interprets the DAN3D simulation results and to generate interactive plots using web programming. The interactive plots represent the position of a debris-flow cluster with a centroid location and show debris-flow characteristics, including the area and width of debris-flow, with a color scale. Additionally, the generated plots provide a graphical-user-interface to extract more details or change the plot. The accessibility and customization provided by the generated plots can be very useful for the design of the protection measures and evaluation of the effectiveness of them. A case study of the debris-flow at Sindonga watersheds, Mt. Umyeon, Korea, in 2011, was used to generate several interactive plots and their usefulness in designing barriers as mitigation against debris-flow.