Abstract :
The MERCW project focuses on the study of chemical munition dump sites in the Baltic Sea and Skagerrak area. Through focused site investigations an assessment will be made of the ecological risks related to the dumped warfare for the marine ecosystem and people. One of the objectives of the project is to illustrate the results from the risk assessment using innovative visualization techniques. Our aim is to develop technology to interactively analyze and explore data that is collected, simulated, and used in the project, in order to support decision-making, risk analysis, and emergency plans. The data to be considered will include detailed bathymetric maps of the sea bottom, different scalar fields defined on the 3D water volume (e.g. temperature, salinity, and concentrations of poisonous substances) as well as vector fields (e.g. sea currents). In order to achieve this goal we will apply and enhance well-established methods of terrain, volume, and flow visualization. Special emphasis will be put on fast techniques that exploit the parallel computing power of current graphics processing units (GPUs). In addition to common visualization techniques, stereo rendering in virtual environments, such as PowerWall and CAVE, will further enhance the perception and understanding of complex 3D phenomena.
