THE VISUALIZATION METHOD OF THE 3D CONCENTRATION DISTRIBUTION OF ASIAN DUST IN THE GOOGLE EARTH

Abstract. The Asian dust (called "Kosa" in Japan) transported from desert areas in the northern China often covers over East Asia in the late winter and spring seasons. In this study, first of all, for dust events observed at various places in Japan on April 1, 2007 and March 21, 2010, the long-range transport simulation of Asian dust from desert areas in the northern China to Japan is carried out. Next, the method for representing 3D dust clouds by means of the image overlay functionality provided in the Google Earth is described. Since it is very difficult to display 3D dust clouds along the curvature of the Earth on the global scale, the 3D dust cloud distributed at the altitude of about 6300m was divided into many thin layers, each of which is the same thickness. After each of layers was transformed to the image layer, each image layer was displayed at the appropriate altitude in the Google Earth. Thus obtained image layers were displayed every an hour in the Google Earth. Finally, it is shown that 3D Asian dust clouds generated by the method described in this study are represented as smooth 3D cloud objects even if we looked at Asian dust clouds transversely in the Google Earth.