Visualization of Relationships between Precipitation and River Water Levels

Abstract

Observation of precipitation changes is important for a variety of purposes such as predicting river levels. Previous studies for data visualization of precipitation and river water levels plotted graphs and color bars were many stations on a map. Instead of such visualizations on a map, we construct a graph to imitate a connected structure such as a tributary of a river in this study. Our method displays two pseudo-coloring sparklines at nodes of the graph as the stations. The method can visualize the time difference between the increase in precipitation upstream and the increase in river water level downstream. Users can observe precipitation and river water levels at different observation points. Our method uses a Delaunay diagram connecting gauging positions to interpolate and calculate precipitation at river level observation points. This avoids the discrepancy between observation points.In addition, we adjust the amount of visualized information by skipping the display of several observation points based on the similarity of the time-series data at each station, which is calculated by applying the dynamic time-stretching method. The visualization results show that downstream, once the water level rises, it tends to take longer for the water level to drop. In addition, the results show that a time lag occurs between the increase in precipitation and the rise in river levels in the mainstream, while tributaries have little time lag. In addition, data on rainfall and river levels at the same station over multiple periods and their relationship are plotted as scatter plots. The scatter plots make it easier to compare data from multiple periods at the same time than two-tone pseudo coloring sparklines.