Abstract. Each year, lives are needlessly lost to floods due to residents failing to heed evacuation advisories. Risk communication research suggests that flood warnings need to be more vivid, contextualized, and visualizable, in order to engage the message recipient. This paper makes the case for the development of a low-cost augmented reality tool that enables individuals to visualize, at close range and in three-dimension, their homes, schools, and places of work and worship subjected to flooding (modeled upon a series of federally expected flood hazard levels). This paper also introduces initial tool development in this area and the related data input stream.