Issue 64

Industrial and Regulatory Applications of Surfer

Bradley Evans
Murdoch University, Australia

Industrial emissions have been at the forefront of concern since the industrial revolution. Proponents of new industrial developments and the regulatory institutions and regulations that guide them need easy to understand visual tools to understand human impacts of such emissions. The physics behind modelling these impacts is a moving target at the cutting edge of scientific modelling for regulatory purposes. Regulatory models area an essential part of the Environmental Impact Assessment process and regulators place the onus on proponents to use them to show their industrial impact doesn’t negatively impact their community.

Whilst regulatory models often produce gridded data sets of emission concentrations because they are focused heavily on the science often fall short of effectively communicating the desired information graphically. This is where Golden Software’s Surfer makes communicating complex scientific modelling significantly easier. Surfer is a tool for communicating the science to regulators and policy makers.

Imagine you planning an industrial point source emission within a city grid and you want to graphically represent potential dispersion (generated in your model) for city planners and stakeholders. Surfer makes this task easy by allowing the user to combine both its contour and post plotting tools into one useful map.

Figure 1 Surfer Contour/Post Map showing pollutant concentrations.

Surfer gives you total control over the axis scale, contour lines, shading and further enhances the contour map with its ability to overlay a number of map types such as the post map information shown in Figure 1 (i.e. Site x…). Once your regulators desired format is achieved you can save aspects as templates for future use. Designed for enhancing the figure generation process and providing the highest quality vector imagery Surfer produces easy-on-the-eye intuitive graphics. For example, in Figure 1 the viewer can clearly see that emissions originating at Site 1 have the greatest impact on with concentrations as high as 1000 ugm-3 and that these taper out to lows of 200-300 ugm-3 at the extremities. Scanning across the grid one can also identify the contours of dispersion as they propagate from this source. Such a map provides both the proponent and regulator an honest snapshot of the impacts of Site 1 on the other sites – intuitively.

Often proponents and regulators need that little bit more reality in their images and again Surfer already has the answer. Surfer’s Base Map tool can also overlay raster images against vectors. For example, using the contour and post map shown in Figure 1 Surfer users can overlay (or in this case under-lay) aerial photography of the grid. This enables the viewer to see the models predicted concentrations in-situ.

Figure 2 Surfer Contour/Post Map showing pollutant concentrations
with an aerial photography underlay

Bradley Evans is a PhD candidate in the Department of Environment and Conservation at Murdoch University, Australia.