TERRA - An integrated environmental information system approach

Nowadays, one of the major problems is environmental protection. In consideration to low-cost and powerful hardware, numerical simulation techniques can be applied to the calculation of pollution distributions. Our approach requires a two-phase process for the pollution simulation. The wind field over the complex terrain has to be modeled taking into account the current meteorological parameters. The pollution cloud, approximated by particles, behaves in relation to the calculated wind field in additon to physical parameters. Efficient visualization methods, like pseudo-color mapping of thematic environmental data or satellite image texture mapping, provide an optimal post-processing of the simulation results for a qualified analysis. Our new environmental information system TERRA integrates these modules including techniques for the data acquisition of environmental data sets and for the geometric modeling and manipulation of complex terrains.