Abstract
The movement of air masses within the troposphere transport a multitude
of particles, and hence generate air highway connecting distant areas at
the local, continental and global scales depending on the particle
properties and the atmospheric conditions. In this article we present an
approach and an accompanying web application called tropolink for
measuring the extent to which distant locations are potentially
connected by air-mass movement.
This approach is based on the computation of trajectories of air masses
with the HYSPLIT atmospheric transport and dispersion model, and on the
computation of connection frequencies, called connectivities, in the
purpose of building trajectory-based geographical networks. It is
illustrated for different spatial and temporal scales with three case
studies related to plant epidemiology.
The web application that we designed allows the user to easily perform
intensive computation and mobilize massive archived gridded
meteorological data to build weighted directed networks. The analysis of
such networks allowed us for example to describe the potential of
invasion of a migratory pest beyond its actual distribution.
Our approach could also be used to compute geographical networks
generated by air-mass movement for diverse application domains, e.g. to
assess long-term risk of spread from sources of pollutants.