COMBIC, Combined Obscuration Model for Battlefield Induced Contaminants : Volume 1-Technical Documentation and Users Guide

Airborne dust, smoke, and debris can significantly degrade a battlefield environment and affect electro-optical systems. The most direct effect of these combat-induced aerosols on a propagating electromagnetic signal is to remove energy (reduce transmission) through absorption and scattering. Reduced transmission through inventory smokes and dust is generally most significant at visual and infrared wavelengths and less severe at millimeter wavelengths. Obscurant concentrations can change rapidly in a combat environment. Once generated, an aerosol cloud moves with the wind, undergoes thermally buoyant rise, and expands in the atmospheric turbulence. Thus, prevailing winds, aerosol generation factors, and the geometry of targets, observers, and aerosol clouds are important in determining transmission. The Combined Obscuration Model for Battlefield Induced Contaminants (COMBIC) predicts time and spatial variations in transmission through dust and debris raised by high-energy explosives and by vehicular movement; smoke from phosphorus and hexachloroethane munitions; smoke from diesel oil fires; generator- disseminated fog oil and diesel fuel; and other screening aerosols from sources defined by inputs. COMBIC has been designed primarily for large scenarios where many different obscuration sources are present and where many observer-target lines of sight (LOS) must be treated simultaneously. This document has been developed to provide both a technical description of the physics used in the COMBIC model and to serve as an operations guide for users of the COMBIC software.Army Research Lab Adelphi is the author of 'COMBIC, Combined Obscuration Model for Battlefield Induced Contaminants : Volume 1-Technical Documentation and Users Guide', published 2000 under ISBN 9781423534471 and ISBN 1423534476.