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Inside this Issue |
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| Digital Dog Mushing: Implementing Technology to Follow Alaska's State Sport | ||
Dr. Matt Nolan, Water and Environmental Research Center, Institute of Northern Engineering, UAF |
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Story by Lorien Nettleton
The Iditarod is the highest profile dogsled event in the world. In 2006, fans were able to view terrain covered by “The Last Great Race,” in high resolution, streamed over the web and made viewable by three-dimensional virtual earth browsers, using a program called Virtual Iditarod. Even though the race is long over, by accessing www.earthslot.org/iditarod/, race fans can still interactively fly around the state of Alaska and see the 2006 race route in 3D, with high-resolution imagery draped over topography to yield a realistic, video-game quality visualization—even in the height of summer. Virtual Globe applications are quickly becoming the new paradigm in Earth science, Earth science education/outreach, and Earth science logistics and data access. The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) plays an active role in developing this new perspective through the development of tools like Virtual Iditarod. Virtual Iditarod was created as a public service project to demonstrate the scientific and educational aspects of Earth Science Logistics and Outreach Terrainbases (EarthSLOT), a three-dimensional visualization tool and resource developed by the UAF Institute of Northern Engineering (INE) professor Matt Nolan and INE staff member Peter Prokein. During the running of the 2006 Iditarod, the EarthSLOT website hosted live updates from the race route complete with near-real-time updates of the mushers’ positions obtained from the official Iditarod database. The data were displayed using virtual globe browser software from Skyline Software Corp. and Google Earth. The EarthSLOT team supplied the official Iditarod site with GIS tools, information and updated data, as well as non-interactive waypoint flyover movies of the route. Fusing the entertainment of an international dog mushing spectacle with the scientific research activities of Alaska, the EarthSLOT Iditarod implementation included hyperlinked flags denoting the locations of NSF project sites. By offering easy access to information about arctic and sub-arctic studies from the 3D terrain viewer, Nolan and Prokein were able to bridge entertainment and education. The sharp, video-game quality graphics of real Earth data offers on opportunity for the public, scientists and educators alike to associate names and locations of the physical geography of the surrounding area, and their place in the global system. The Application
Combining an earth model and an application or applications into a 3D software engine allows the researchers to create the experience of 3D flying. The applications, a general term to describe different infusions of data, use earth models as a backdrop upon which other features can be overlaid. Street names, weather station locations, GIS layers like shape files, 3D objects like airplanes or cars and basically anything else that is not terrain or imagery data can be included. Applications generally run on the local workstation, so they do not consume network bandwidth while in use. The software engine is the device that lets users explore the Earth model and its activated layers. It registers distance from the object and imports an applicable resolution image from the server to provide increased detail at a closer distance, or lower detail from further away. The Earth model consists of terrain from a number of inputs, usually incorporating topography data obtained from satellite and USGS surveys to create the land-contours and terrain impressions. These data are then draped with imagery obtained from satellite imaging systems, and the combination of depth and image creates the 3D view that allows users to fly through geographical regions. In cases where high-resolution aerial photography is available, these images can be draped over a lower resolution data source (many Earth models use LANDSAT satellite imagery at 15-meter resolution). This process of stitching different resolutions of imagery together creates a patchwork sensation as the viewer passes from areas of differing resolution. As the engine works well with actual point data and draws vectors and 3D polygons, many people are pushing the technology to its limits with their demands for vast multi-point, real-data projection—for example, ARSC postdoctoral fellows John Bailey and Peter Webley seek to visualize million-point ash columns in 3D from live data (see “Volcanoes,” page 3). TerraExplorer Pro also enables people to import their own data for any parameter, including landscape or topography, as well as any features they would like to include for the visualization. The earth model Nolan and Prokein created for use with EarthSLOT draws imagery and terrain data from numerous sources, such as USGS LANDSAT 7, the NASA BlueMarble Dataset, the Alaska Bureau of Land Management, Minnesota Land Management Information Center and the Fairbanks North Star Borough. High-resolution digital elevation models create the topography for parts of Alaska’s North Slope, as well as 12 Alaska mountain passes. The EarthSLOT model also includes a circum-arctic vegetation map, with data obtained from the Alaska Geobotany Center incorporated with the NASA Blue Marble datasets to make highly dynamic polar views available to researchers. The complete online collection of three-dimensional terrain visualization files occupies over seven terabytes of storage. A backup of the massive archive is stored on the ARSC StorageTek™ silos, from which Nolan and Prokein can restore their online content.
EarthSLOT itself is not an end-goal, says Nolan, but is a tool by which this rapidly advancing technology can be used to help scientists, educators and students with the use of 3D GIS earth browser engines, as well as to provide a forum to discuss the technology and features of multiple GIS earth browsing engines. Currently, the development of such software is primarily market-driven, and most applications are focused on navigating tourist destinations, finding wireless hotspots or locating hotels. In a break with the commercial utilization of the tools, several different applications display weather over certain areas, and the USGS has created an active seismic layer to track earthquake activity. These global science applications are only beginning to take root, and Nolan and Prokein see the developmental stages of the technology as the right time to incorporate the tool as a powerful aid to science. The immediate goal of EarthSLOT is to make the technology as common for scientists as PowerPoint™. Nolan and Prokein are interested in encouraging scientists to make use of the recent proliferation of 3D Earth browsing engines, like EarthSLOT or Google Earth, to aid in their scientific presentations and visualizations and to format their research in dynamic ways—from creating a virtual site description, to actually ingesting field data and creating graphical representation of the ecological, biological and geological events that are occurring in a particular area. In March, the researchers held a series of workshops geared towards offering hands-on experience and advice to anyone looking to do similar implementation of their datasets on any variety of projects. To foster academic directions within the Earth browsing community, the First Annual Virtual Globes Scientific Users Conference was held in Boulder, CO July 10-12, 2006. The conference assessed the state-of-the-art online virtual globe browsers in support of Earth sciences. EarthSLOT is supported by the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. For more information, visit http://www.earthslot.org. |
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