干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

This paper describes a physically based method for modeling and animating sandstorm, a type of disastrous natural phenomenon. The method adopts a relatively stable incompressible multiple fluid model to simulate the motion of air, sand, and dust particles. The wind field of sandstorm is established based on Reynold-average Navier-Stokes equations. The sand and dust particle flow is therefore computed taking interaction among the wind, sand, and dust particles into account. To accelerate the modeling process of a dynamic sandstorm scene, a special Multi-Fluid Solver is designed and implemented on GPU. Various illumination effects of sandstorm scenes can be simulated by spectral sampling scattering calculation. Animations of realistic sandstorms occurring in desert and urban areas based on our model are demonstrated. Compared with the real sandstorm photos, our simulated results are satisfactory. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.