Perl, PDL and Air Pollution

By Heiko Klein from Oslo.pm
Date: Thursday, 15 June 2006 14:00
Duration: 60 minutes
Language:

In Europe, it is estimated that more people die from air pollution diseases than in traffic accidents. While traffic can be regulated within a countries borders, air pollution is an international issue, covered for Europe by the UN-ECE Convention for Long Range Air Pollution.
To assess the current air pollution situation and estimate future scenarios the European countries are asked to send in their emission estimates. Complex dispersion models run on Top500 supercomputers calculate then the meteorological and chemical influence to the emissions. The results need to be compared to measurements and are published to the general public, other scientists and decision makers.

The talk will concentrate on the role of Perl in air pollution, starting from web-interfaces to automate emission data retrieval over data-validation of large model results to templating for publications. Since PDL, the Perl Data Language, is often involved in those tasks, a short introduction to PDL will be given.