13:30-15:00 Paper Session
Carlo Navarra, Tomasz Opach, Katerina Vrotsou, Almar Joling, Julie Wilk, Tina Neset
Visual Exploration of Climate-Related Volunteered Geographic Information
Felix Raith, Christian Blecha, Karsten Rink, Wenqing Wang, Olaf Kolditz, Hua Shao, Gerik Scheuermann
Visual Analysis of a Full-Scale-Emplacement Experiment in the Underground Rock Laboratory Mont Terri using Fiber Surfaces
Vung Pham, David Weindorf, Tommy Dang
SoilScanner: 3D Visualization for Soil Profiling using Portable X-ray15:00-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-17:00 Keynote
Rodman Ray Linn
Fire/atmosphere modeling: opportunities and challenges
Wildland fires continue to pose risk to lives and property and thus
practitioners and scientists continue to work to gain better
understanding and ability to predict their behavior. Simultaneously,
wildland fire decision makers are working towards more proactive
approaches to managing the risk of wildfire , such as fuels treatments
and prescribed fire. Executing such measures requires the ability to
explore the ramification of such treatments as well as ensure that
prescribed fires will meet their objectives. Experiments and
observations have demonstrated that the two-way feedbacks between fires
and atmosphere play critical roles in determining how fires spread or if
they spread. Advancements in computing and numerical modeling have
generated new opportunities for the use of models that couple
process-based wildfire models to atmospheric hydrodynamics models.
These process-based coupled fire/atmosphere models, which simulate
critical processes such as heat transfer, buoyancy-induced flows and
vegetation aerodynamic drag, are not practical for operational
faster-than-real-time fire prediction due to their computational and
data requirements. However, these process-based coupled fire-atmosphere
models make it possible to represent many of the fire-atmosphere
feedbacks and thus have the potential to complement experiments, add
perspective to observations, bridge between idealized-fire scenarios and
more complex and realistic landscape fire scenarios, allow for
sensitivity analysis that is impractical through observations and pose
new hypothesis that can be tested experimentally. Additionally, coupled
wildfire/atmosphere modeling opens new possibilities for understanding
the sometime counterintuitive impacts of fuel management and exploring
the implications of various prescribed fire tactics. Certainly, there
need to be continued efforts to validate the results from these
numerical investigations, but, even so, they suggest relationships,
interactions and phenomenology that should be considered in the context
of the interpretation of observations, design of fire behavior
experiments, development of new operational models and even risk
management. One of the critical aspects of using these sorts of models
and learning from them for the development of new operational models is
the challenge of visualizing them. Learning to find ways of digesting
three-dimensional variation of the interaction between fire and
atmosphere is critical. For this purpose, we have had to employ various
strategies to visualize this highly transient and highly heterogeneous
modeling results involving approximately 20 critical state variable.