How to Enhance Cartographic Visualisations of Natural Hazards Assessment Results

Abstract

Cartographic visualisations are important tools for the communication of hazard related data among stakeholders. Although these representations are essential for various hazard management tasks, an analysis of existing hazard visualisations showed that they often disregard cartographic principles. This leads to confusion on the part of users through poor representations and consequently to an impairment of the information flow. The objective of this research is to offer suggestions for enhanced hazard visualisations to facilitate hazard management tasks and decision making. Existing cartographic shortcomings are identified based on an extensive analysis of hazard visualisations and an expert survey. These shortcomings are discussed and improvements for important cartographic elements are presented.