Visual Analytics of Air Pollutant Propagation Path and Pollution Source

Recently, controlling air pollution has become increasingly significant due to its impact on our health and daily lives. To prevent and control pollution, it is crucial to trace its source. Many researches have been developed for tracing the source of pollution. However, traditional methods using large-scale simulations need a large number of computation resources and time-consuming. In addition, traditional traceability algorithms do not consider topographic factors, which can cause a certain amount of errors. To resolve above problems, an interactive visual analytics system for pollutant traceability is proposed. In our method, instead of three-dimensional field data, only two-dimensional grid data is enough to track pollution sources in real time. Furthermore, our method can further improve precision through considering topographic factors, which are usually ignored by existing methods. Finally, the possible pollution sources are also identified in our method. This is achieved through analysis of changes in pollutant concentration and the distribution of man-made emission sources. In order to verify the effectiveness of this method, we propose a series of application examples to comprehensively analyze the sources of pollutants.