Inside the Levee Digital Twin: A Guided Walkthrough of California's Newest Flood Infrastructure Monitoring Tool Sponsored

When the Levee Digital Twin Platform launched for California's Yuba River Corridor earlier this year, it introduced engineers and asset managers to a browser-based, continuously updated model of two critical levee sites, RD784 and Dry Creek, built from two full field seasons of aerial, subsurface, and sensor data. What makes the platform genuinely usable in day-to-day practice, however, isn't just the depth of the data it holds. It's the guided walkthrough that helps new users find their way through it.

Why a Walkthrough Matters for Infrastructure Digital Twins

Digital twins for critical infrastructure live or die on adoption. A platform can integrate LiDAR point clouds, thermal imagery, borehole logs, and live piezometer feeds. Still, if the people responsible for levee inspection and condition assessment can't quickly find the layer or tool they need, that richness goes unused. leveedigitaltwin.org addresses this directly with a full walkthrough video that tours the platform end to end, with no separate manual or training session required.

The tutorial walks new visitors through:

• Touring the platform's cover page and top-level controls, User Guide, and Tutorial button, before orienting within the RD 784 study site's main layout

• Navigating the map with pan, zoom, and basemap switching (Street, Topo, Satellite), plus 3D terrain draping and split-screen viewport options

• Working with all six data layers: photos, raster imagery, vector data, subsurface surveys, point clouds, and live sensors, including the platform's AI-based burrow detection

• Exploring the dedicated 3D point cloud viewer, with multiple cloud overlays, depth shading, and a height profile tool for slicing across surface and subsurface data at once

• Running on-screen measurements and exporting titled map layouts such as PNG or PDF

• Reviewing live piezometer readings and camera feeds, with adjustable time ranges and sensor status alerts

Because the walkthrough is embedded in the interface itself, it can be revisited at any time, useful for both first-time users and teams onboarding new staff to an existing deployment.

The video below walks through the platform's interface and demonstrates the quick-start tutorial in practice: