Advances in 3D visualization of air quality data

¹ Environmental Software and Modeling Group, Computer Science School, Technical University of Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo, Boadilladel Monte, 28660 Madrid, Spain
² Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, Faculty of Physics, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Abstract

The air quality models produce a considerable amount of data, raw data can be hard to conceptualize, particularly when the size of the data sets can be terabytes, so to understand the atmospheric processes and consequences of air pollution it is necessary to analyse the results of the air pollution simulations. The basis of the development of the visualization is shaped by the requirements of the different group of users. We show different possibilities to represent 3D atmospheric data and geographic data. We present several examples developed with IDV software, which is a generic tool that can be used directly with the simulation results. The rest of solutions are specific applications developed by the authors which are the integration of different tools and technologies. In the case of the buildings has been necessary to make a 3D model from the buildings data using COLLADA standard format. In case of the Google Earth approach, for the atmospheric part we use Ferret software. In the case of gvSIG.-3D for the atmospheric visualization we have used different geometric figures available: “QuadPoints”, “Polylines”, “Spheres” and isosurfaces. The last one is also displayed following the VRML standard.