Intuitive visualization of transient groundwater flow

Understanding and interpreting flow problems is an existing challenge in scientific visualization. In particular, the graphical presentation of transient flow data can be a significant problem. This contribution introduces an intuitive method to animate transient 3D groundwater flow on planar and curved 2D surfaces in a very illustrative way. The main aim of this approach is to support the presentation of simulation results in front of audiences for whom groundwater modeling is outside their area of expertise, that is, non-experts. Particularly, data sets with a highly irregular mesh or point distribution can be visualized descriptively. The flow field is easily rendered in a comprehensible way using animated pathlets with a novel, time-dependent seeding strategy which is described in more detail in this contribution. A hydrological example is used to present the capabilities and especially the intuitive character of our visualization method.