  This article presents a 3D geographic information systems (GIS) modeling and
simulation of water flow in a landscape defined by a digital terrain model,
provided by some available geolocation APIs. The proposed approach uses a
cellular automata based algorithm to calculate water flow dynamic. The
methodology was tested on a case study area of 27kmx19km located in Tangier,
north of Morocco. In fact, we aim to detect flood zones in order to prevent
problems related to space occupation in urban and rural regions. Some indices
can be deduced from the stream shape using Cellular Automata (CA) based
approach that can reduce the complexity related to space structures with
multiple changes. A spatiotemporal simulation of the runoff process is provided
using 3D visualization that we can pair with geographical information system
tools (GIS). The 3D GIS modeling approach that was developed for the analyses
of flood zones detection using a runoff model based on cellular automata was
comprised of three main steps: Input (collection of data), calculation (CA
tool) and visualization (3D simulation).
