SOFTWARE PACKAGE FOR MODELING AEROSPACE MONITORING AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL ("GEODIALOG")

Author: V. Egorov
Organization: Space Research Institute

Moscow 117810
Russia

Phone: (095) 333-3589
Fax: (095) 310-7023
Egorov@iki.rssi.ru

Environmental problems recently have been acquiring an acute character and become a major concern for the world community. Monitoring the environment with an adequate timeliness and spatial range is possible only with the aerospace remote sensing systems. They have reached a satisfactory level of development. However, their informational potential is not used effectively. There are several reasons for that.

First, their output information does not match well the practical problems of environmental control. Therefore, it loses a large part of its value - speaking thermodynamically, it simply dissipates. There is also a reverse side to this problem: the aerospace monitoring systems are not instructed to take into account the effects of environmental control based on their information, and so lack the major feedback channel for optimizing the information collected. Consequently, the monitoring devices and the domains of practical applications of their data are functionally disjoint and do not form a complete monitoring - control feedback system.

Second, in the process of remote sensor development usually no modeling of the virtual practical application of their data is done. Therefore, the parameters of sensors - radars, radiometers, scanners, cameras - are selected, to a large degree, on the basis of a subjective judgment. Therefore, the information obtained from such sensors, has some unnecessary built-in limitations, which no subsequent experience can alleviate.

Optimizing the aerospace remote sensing systems and using their data more effectively for environmental control calls for new methods of information design and analysis. This was the reason for developing the software package 'Geodialog'.