River Bed Morphodynamics: Metamodeling, Reliability Analysis, and Visualization in a Virtual Environment

Numerical simulations of river bed evolution (morphodynamics) can be used for evaluating river engineering concepts and efficient operation of waterways. Reliability analysis is used to detect the origin of uncertainties, to track their propagation in the model and to evaluate their contribution to the result of the modeling. We have developed a new approach for the reliability analysis of morphohydrodynamical simulations, including a fast interpolation of simulation results with radial basis functions (RBF) and an efficient quantile estimator based on quasi-Monte Carlo sampling. Realistic examples are used to test the efficiency of the approach. An interactive 3D virtual environment has been employed for visual exploration of the results. The developed virtual environment application allows for a detailed inspection of the numerical model, including the evolution of the water level, river bed profiles and their quantiles. In this way one achieves a full immersion into the model space and an understanding of morphohydrodynamical processes in an intuitive way.