A rapid meshing technique for simulations of near-surface phenomena involving remote sensing technology

A technique is presented for rapidly producing finite element meshes in support of large-scale remote sensing simulations. These unstructured tetrahedral meshes typically have more than one million elements and more than 250 thousand nodes, and allow for arbitrary placement of objects into the scene. They can be reproduced in less than 30 minutes on a Cray XT3 architecture. Open-source mesh generation packages are used in conjunction with a tetrahedra element smoothing operation to achieve the desired final meshes. The resulting generated meshes used by a suite of thermal models and corresponding meteorological inputs provide the spatial distribution of near-surface thermal exitance.