Determination of Terrain Ponding for Logistics Emplacement and Planning

Terrain and weather profoundly impact military operationsespecially in austere environments. The ability of military planners to prepare for the effects of terrain and weather offers greater responsiveness and survivability. Technology Service Corp (TSC) and its Colorado State University (CSU) partner propose flexible terrain and soil moisture impact analysis software tools to support agile operational planning and off-line analyses. Our approach includes combining considerable Army investment in decision support tools with other state-of-the-art information technologies to provide these tools. Tools will include: 1) an efficient, configurable and flexible terrain analysis engine; 2) a packaged soil moisture estimation module suitable to support development of the next generation NATO Reference Mobility Model (NRMM) and 3) a generalized soil moisture estimation engine applicable to a wide range of military and commercial analyses that include soil interactions. In Phase I and subsequent research, TSC and CSU investigated soil moisture estimation formulations that provide outputs at tactical resolutions (< 100 m pixels). They also investigated user-configurable geospatial reconnaissance (terrain analysis) engine implementations. The proposed Phase II will further generalize these engines for enhanced performance, robustness and applicability to a broader range of military and commercial applications.