The Chesapeake Bay Virtual Environment (CBVE): Initial Results From the Prototypical System

The authors develop a modeling framework that integrates hydrodynamic circulation models and various biological models with the computer visualization paradigm of the virtual world to investigate coupled linkages between physics and biology within the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. These initial efforts, demonstrated at Supercomputing '95 on the ImmersaDesk, focus on how environmental forcing affects the flow in the Chesapeake Bay and how biological distributions change in response to this circulation. The authors use the virtual environment to visualize time- dependent, three-dimensional, multivariate ecological data sets. This visualization process greatly aids in the interpretation and synthesis of the supercomputer-based numerical simulations and provides new insights into the ecological consequences of physical and biological inter actions. Viewing, navigating through, and interacting with multidimensional fields (e.g., salinity, circulation vectors, larval fish distributions) in the virtual environment provides a sense of presence that greatly improves one's ability to understand inherently complex processes, thereby ad vancing the implementation of coupled physical-biological models. The use of data sonification to portray modeled data in the virtual environment also improves one's ability to interpret the numerical results.