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Figure 1: On-site mobile phone visualisation for community engagement and consultation. |
This project builds upon the previous Investigation of Saltwater Intrusion into Coastal Aquifers project.
Water management and the monitoring of water salinity are major environmental concerns in the farming regions of Australia.
The aim of this project was to develop the tools to analyse and visualise the large data sets associated with water management. This project looked specifically at the Lockyer Valley in Queensland, building upon earlier work carried out for the Bundaberg Gooburrum aquifer system, however the technologies developed within this project can be applied to other regions of interest.
The first line of investigation of this project was the visualisation of water management data relating to the Lockyer Valley and the development of remote online visualisation tools to assist with community consultation and engagement. This has led to the development of a pilot remote visualisation tool that gives the people directly benefiting from the analysis (e.g., scientists, water usage decision makers and farmers) the capability of viewing visualisations of water management data through a mobile phone or PDA, without requiring access to high performance computing and visualisation facilities.
On a Java J2ME enabled mobile phone or PDA, the client program displays the visualisation images, and sends requests for new images to the visualisation server. This server creates a model of the data using VTK off-screen rendering. The view of the model would be saved as an image on the server, and the server would send the image to the mobile device via httpservletresponse. The client then processes the response and displays the requested image.
An image of the pilot system in use is shown in Figure 1.
Work with DNM&R has also led to the development of the framework to display and visualise the many data sets involved in groundwater management, such as bore locations, surface strata, groundwater table levels etc.
The system (see Figure 2 below) will allow the user to interactively select the datasets to be viewed along with manipulation of the properties (eg. Transparency, on/off toggle, texture mapping).
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Figure 2: Current version of the Java visualisation framework for the Lockyer Valley |
The other line of investigation is the development of a large-scale simulation of the transportation of salt in the Gooburrum coastal aquifer system near Bundaberg. This has led to the development of a parallel implementation of three-dimensional saltwater intrusion code for the Bundaberg region. This work involves solving the three-dimensional nonlinear saltwater intrusion transport equations using the finite volume method, and is being carried out on an SGI Origin 3000 at QUT. The final component of the project will see this code utilised by QUT and DNR&M researchers to simulate the complex transport processes for the Bundaberg coastal aquifer system. Work on this project is continuing under an ARC grant.
This was a joint QUT project with the Department of Natural Resources and Mines.
Participants
Professor
Ian Turner, School of Mathematical Sciences, QUT
Dr. Malcolm Cox,
School of Natural Resource Sciences,
QUT
Dr. Joseph Young, HPC Group and School of Mathematical Sciences, QUT
Industry Participant
Mr. Andrew Durick, Senior Hydrologist, Department of Natural Resources & Mines
Reports
Final Report - May 2006
(1.26 MB PDF)
Progress Report - November 2005
(0.9 MB PDF)
Project Proposal - August 2005
(1.23 MB PDF)