3D Animation of Asian dust clouds in the Google Earth

The widely spread Asian dust over East Asia has significant effects on the climate change and fine dust particles in the atmosphere have harmful influence on our health. It is, therefore, important to understand when and where sand dust particles were released and through which paths they were transported to other areas. However, it is difficult to show the movement of 3D objects on the global scale in the Google Earth because we cannot successfully display 3D objects along the curvature of the Earth. In this study, the time variation of the 3D concentration distribution of Asian dust clouds derived from the long-range transport model are shown in the Google Earth. We first transform the file format of 3D concentration distribution of Asian dust clouds obtained the transport simulation into the VRML format (wrl). After that, we read them in terms of the 3dsMAX software and then we divided 3D Asian dust clouds distributed at the altitude of about 6000m into 10 layers and displayed each of layers at the appropriate altitude in the Google Earth. Thus obtained image layers are displayed every one hour from March 19 to 23, 2010 in the Google Earth. In order to animate the movement of 3D Asian dust clouds in the Google Earth, we also developed the software for automatically generating the KML script file and the image folder in which images corresponding to each layer of 3D dust clouds are saved. As a result, it is shown that 3D Asian dust clouds created by the procedure described above are recognized as smooth 3D objects even if we zoom in the Google Earth.