The Augmented REality Sandtable (ARES) developed by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Advanced Simulation and Training Division (ATSD) in Orlando, Florida, is a prototype interactive visualization environment used by ARL for research in battlespace visualization. ARES is in use at several locations such as West Point, Camp Blanding and a few ROTC units as a training aid. The software (and in some cases, additional tables) is being shared with several organizations for collaboration in research. The ARES architecture is intended to be an open, extensible platform to be expanded by the addition of new capabilities (as "apps" through the ARES APIs). A critical future use case involves plume dispersion of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive (CBRNE) constituents. This project aims to couple an NCAR Atmospheric Transport & Dispersion (AT&D) simulation capability to the ARES system.
RAL staff have developed a software framework and custom hardware platform for advanced atmospheric flow and constituent plume transport and dispersion simulations from which ARES API requests for can be requested by a sandtable user. The user prescribes and submits a simulation request via RabbitMQ message exchange to the “SimBox” server. The server subsequently performs automated setup, and launch through a python model-view-controller software framework, for a specific simulation based on allowable user inputs. The simulation server is a multithreaded python daemon responsible for setting up and launching a specific MPI-capable WRF simulation. Upon successful simulation launch, the simulation server utilizes python watchdog threads to track output of WRF simulation results to file. As a WRF simulation progresses and new results are continuously written the simulation server encodes this data and publishes them again via RabbitMQ for rendering plume/meteorology animations back onto the sandtable.
This integration of NCAR AT&D simulation capability alongside an augmented reality visualization medium provides a potential disruptive technological advance in current training and strategic planning paradigms across many emergency response preparedness application spaces from urban air transport and dispersion consequence to wildland fire or extreme weather events.
Urban environment effects due through two candidate approaches. Buildings will be represented on the resolved grid through both either the immersed boundary method, or a geometry resolved, subgrid-scale porous media-like drag formulation.
WRF to GPU-LES coupling for combined mesoscale and microscale modeling in one system utilizing the cell perturbation method for resolved turbulence instigation at the nested boundaries LES domains.