Computer graphics -- the domain of Woody the pixillated cowboy -- are being harnessed to map the 3-dimensional movement of clouds of pollution. And just in time: Clouds of chemical pollution are now covering much of the industrialized world, raising the visibility of interstate transport of pollutants.
When pollution moves, say from the Midwest to the Atlantic seaboard, it can cause a wave of fingerpointing among source and destination communities. Milwaukee blames Chicago. New York blames Ohio. You get the picture -- think of a preschool blaming festival where a lot of money and health rides on the outcome.
The recipients say it's only fair that upstream communities clean up their smokestacks. Meanwhile, the alleged polluters say they're being unjustly blamed for pollution caused by others.
the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. This image illustrates sulfer dioxide with iso-lines of nitric acid © The SSEC Visualization Project.
That's where the new imaging software may help: by showing how pollution moves across borders.
The "Vis5D" software gets its information from computer models of weather and pollution, which, in turn, get their information from radar, satellites, ground stations and other sources. The role of Vis5D is to convert the sea of numbers into pictures, which the brain grasps much more readily than columns of numbers. The software can rotate, slice, and animate the images to test out "what-if" scenarios.
The software images are akin to the weather maps we see on the evening news, but instead of showing cold fronts and thunderstorms, they portray clouds of nitrogen or sulfur oxides. "It's conceivable that one day pollution maps may be as ubiquitous as weather maps are today," says William Hibbard, staff scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center, a developer of the Vis5D software. Already, he adds, Vis5D has become the major 3-D picture-making software for weather, ocean and pollution modelers.
For information on the movement of continent-sized clouds of dust and haze, see "Smog from Space" in the bibliography) .
The following snippet goes to the tune of "I've got sixpence:"
I've got sootprints, tiny tiny sootprints . I've got sootprints, to bust some filthy pipes..."
