WEB BASED 3D VISUALISATION OF TIME-VARYING AIR QUALITY INFORMATION

Abstract

Many countries where the industrial development and production rates are high face many side effects of low air quality and air pollution. There is an evident correlation between the topographic and climatic properties of a location and the air pollution and air quality on that location. As the variation of air quality is dependent on location, air quality information should be acquired, utilised, stored and presented in form of Geo-Information. On the other hand, as this information is related with the health concerns of public, the information should be available publicly, and needs to be presented through an easily accessible medium and through a commonly used interface. Efficient storage of time-varying air quality information when combined with an efficient mechanism of 3D web-based visualisation would help very much in dissemination of air quality information to public. This research is focused on web-based 3D visualisation of time-varying air quality data. A web based interactive system is developed to visualise pollutant levels that were acquired as hourly intervals from more than 100 stations in Turkey between years 2008 and 2017. The research also concentrated on visualisation of geospatial high volume data. In the system, visualisation can be achieved on-demand by querying an air pollutant information database of 10.330.629 records and a city object database with more than 700.000 records. The paper elaborates on the details of this research. Following a background on air quality, air quality models, and Geo-Information visualisation, the system architecture and functionality is presented. The paper concludes with results of usability tests of the system.