Web-based dynamic and interactive environmental visualization

The development of novel interactive visualizations can substantially contribute to environmental modeling and understanding of complex environmental processes. To allow the Web Map Service (WMS) to support this, this paper explores a generic framework in which a dynamic environmental modeling process can be interactively visualized, controlled and tuned on the Internet by using Java 3D-based hybrid Internet computation through the simulation steering technique. A hydrological model, TOPMODEL, is employed to illustrate the simulation of a rainfall-run off process within a computational and steering environment. This environment allows users to visually interact and experiment with environmental model computation, thereby facilitating the exploration of process-based environmental applications.