The Synthetic Environments (SE) Program, a technology component of DARPA's Synthetic Theater of War (STOW) initiative, has developed novel technology to create and use digital battlespaces of increasing size, fidelity and complexity needed for large-scale distributed simulation at the Joint Task Force level. The technical objective was to model tactically significant battlefield detail and phenomenology that impact the performance and behavior of entity-level combat platforms, sensors and weapons (e.g., tanks, helicopters, ships, missiles, rounds). The developmental strategy was grounded on the transformation and rationalization of operational terrain, bathymetric, meteorological and oceanographic data products into an integrated environmental data base and the adaptation of environmental models to real-time operations.

Considerable progress has been achieved in a period of three years. The spatial extents of STOW environmental data bases have been systematically extended to support combined air, amphibious, ground, naval and special operations over large areas with geodetic rigor. Internally, 3D spatial topology has been developed to support multiple elevation surfaces including ocean surface and ocean floor, bridges, tunnels and multistory buildings. Mechanisms to represent and distribute dynamic meteorological and atmospheric fields have been incorporated into the synthetic battlespace.

Where the STOW Europe synthetic environment of 1994 was a static benign world populated by dynamic warfighters, the STOW 97 synthetic environment featured dynamic natural effects (e.g., time-of-day, wind, rain, fog, dust) as well as man-made environmental effects (e.g., smoke, flares, destroyed bridges and buildings). Progress in dynamic terrain, one of the most difficult issues in distributed simulation, has been exceptional to include terrain cratering. Real-world weather has now been introduced into distributed simulation within an architecture that support execution of nested feature and effects models.