Integration of a computational grid and virtual geographic environment to facilitate air pollution simulation

Air pollution, which is a global environmental problem, has been the hot research area among the scientists in the geoscience community. Air pollution simulation is of low-efficiency caused by the computation-intensive models, such as MM5 or WRF, and the complicated and unfriendly user interface. These issues are addressed in this paper by integrating computational grid and virtual geographic environment (VGE). The computational grid is employed to improve the computation efficiency of air pollution models. The VGE is used as a straightforward and easy to use interface to navigate the air pollution modeling workflow and improve the operational efficiencies of the models with respect to initiation, computation, and output visualization. On the aspect of technique implementation, this paper designs a framework and addresses the methodologies of the integration of computational grid and VGE. The prototype system, which integrates the computation grid of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUGrid) and a VGE to facilitate air pollution simulation based on the Mesoscale Model Version 5 (MM5), was developed. Based on the prototype system, a case was tested and the results indicate that the efficiencies of air pollution simulation on the model computation and workflow operation based on MM5 are increased significantly. This success also proves the reasonability of our general contribution of integrating computational grid and VGE to facilitate air pollution simulation.