Advancement of Digital Yellow River Based on the Virtual Geographic Environments
基于虚拟地理环境的数字黄河研究进展

The Yellow River is the second largest river in China and the most complex and refractory river in the world, which has prominent characteristics different from other great rivers. The main sticking point of Yellow River is the bedload, where the amount of water is less than that of bedload. The grievous water and soil erosion of Loess Plateau conduces to the lower reaches of Yellow River deposit and makes the riverbed higher and higher in thousands of years. All these make the Yellow River become a famous hanging river. Virtual Geographic Environments (VGE) includes the mapping of human society environment and natural environment in the computerized three-dimension space, which is developed rapidly following the information technology advancement in recent 20 years. "Prototype Yellow River", "Model Yellow River" and "Digital Yellow River" are propounded based on the development of geographic information system, 3D visualization technology, modern remote sensing and VGE technology. The research significance and research methods have been summarized in this paper. In the mean time, the paper has discussed the key technology problems of "Digital Yellow River" research, which includes the computer expression, the behavior depict and more factors influencing the Yellow River in natural environments and human society environments. A crucial portion, "digital channel model", is exampled here to picture the "digital drainage basin model", "digital reservoir model", "digital bayou model" in VGE.