TITLE:
Unified Data Model of Urban Air Pollution Dispersion and 3D Spatial City Model: Groundwork Assessment towards Sustainable Urban Development for Malaysia
AUTHORS:
Uznir Ujang, François Anton, Alias Abdul Rahman
KEYWORDS:
3D Spatial City Model; Urban Air Dispersion Model; Unified Data Model; Sustainable Urban Development; CityGML; 3D Visualization; 3D GIS
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.4 No.7,
July
18,
2013
ABSTRACT: Understanding the behavior of urban
air pollution is important en route for sustainable urban development (SUD). Malaysia
is on its mission to be a developed country by year 2020 comprehends dealing with
air pollution is one of the indicators headed towards it. At present monitoring
and managing air pollution in urban areas encompasses sophisticated air quality
modeling and data acquisition. However, rapid developments in major cities
cause difficulties in acquiring the city geometries. The existing method in
acquiring city geometries data via ground or space measurement inspection such
as field survey, photogrammetry, laser scanning, remote sensing or using
architectural plans appears not to be practical because of its cost and
efforts. Moreover, air monitoring stations deployed are intended for regional
to global scale model whereby it is not accurate for urban areas with typical
resolution of less than 2 km. Furthermore in urban areas, the pollutant dispersion movements are
trapped between buildings initiating it to move vertically causing
visualization complications which imply the limitations of existing
visualization scheme
that is based on two-dimensional (2D) framework. Therefore this paper aims is
to perform groundwork assessment and discuss on the current scenario in
Malaysia in the aspect of current policies towards SUD, air quality monitoring
stations, scale model and detail discussion on air pollution dispersion model
used called the Operational Street Pollution Model (OSPM). This research
proposed the implementation of three-dimensional (3D) spatial city model as a
new physical data input for OSPM. The five Level of Details (LOD) of 3D spatial
city model shows the scale applicability for the dispersion model implementtation.
Subsequently 3D spatial city model data commonly available on the web, by
having a unified data model shows the advantages in easy data acquisition, 3D
visualization of air pollution dispersion and improves visual analysis of air
quality monitoring in urban areas.