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GENERATING SOPHISTICATED SPATIAL SURROGATES USING THE MIMS SPATIAL ALLOCATOR
Citation:
EYTH, A. M. AND W. G. BENJEY. GENERATING SOPHISTICATED SPATIAL SURROGATES USING THE MIMS SPATIAL ALLOCATOR. Presented at 14th Annual Emission Inventory Conference, Las Vegas, NV, April 11 - 14, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to improve modelers' ability to focus on scientific and management issues in modeling studies by providing software that supports evaluating and applying complex systems of models. The objective is to also provide software that enables or supports linking different media models together to better address multimedia issues.
Description:
The Multimedia Integrated Modeling System (MIMS) Spatial Allocator is open-source software for generating spatial surrogates for emissions modeling, changing the map projection of Shapefiles, and performing other types of spatial allocation that does not require the use of a commercial Geographic Information System (GIS). The December 2003 version of the Spatial Allocator was able to generate basic point-, line-, and polygon-based surrogates for modeling grids from data contained in Shapefiles. In January 2005, a new version of the Spatial Allocator became available with features that allow it to reproduce the surrogates that are currently being used by EPA. The new features included in this version are the following: subsets of Shapefiles can be defined and used to generate surrogates or create smaller Shapefiles, surrogates can be generated based on a function of multiple attributes in one or more Shapefiles, surrogates can be generated using weighted sums of other surrogates, and new surrogates can be made by filling in the gaps of less comprehensive surrogates. An additional release of the Spatial Allocator will be made in June 2005. This version will be able to create the inputs for biogenic emissions processing that are required by the Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions (SMOKE) modeling system; perform general spatial allocation functions, such as mapping gridded data to and from county-level data, mapping from grid to grid, and aggregating data from census tract to county levels; and print the attributes of shapes that are overlapped by a grid, bounding box, or set of polygons.