visualizing water infrastructure with sankey maps: a case study of mapping the los angeles aqueduct, california

Creating resilience for urban water supply systems requires innovative thematic visualizations of the interface between infrastructure, ecology, and culture to viscerally engage lay audiences in the policy making process. sankey maps (a hybrid sankey diagram/flow map) embed the systemic accounting of flows between sources and sinks into a spatial framework. this allows a hierarchy of visual variables to encode environmental conditions and historical data, providing a rich multivariate context supporting public discourse, policy making, and system operations. the article features a sankey map of the los angeles aqueduct system (california, usa) (not to scale).