Terrestrial Heat Flow Database Management System and Geographical Information System, P.R.China

Abstract

Terrestrial heat flow data are significantly important to characterize the thermal regime and to reveal the geodynamic processes of the continental lithosphere. Heat flow data for the continental area of China have been collected using both published data (up to 2000) as well as unpublished data. The data set is composed of 970 observations (1080 records) from different sites. Within the continental area of China, heat flow values range from 15 to 364 , with a mean of 64.2 75.6 (n=1013).

The terrestrial heat flow database was constructed based on Microsoft Access 97. And it was developed with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 and composed of 27 forms, 2 modules and 10 reports. Furthermore, the terrestrial heat flow database system has also provided a powerful querying system containing a graphic query system and a text query system. The user can query the data what he wants rapidly and effectively, and then the user also can customize his own query condition .The GIS technology was imported in this study .The heat flow GIS of China has been developed based on the ArcInfo 8 and MapObjects made by ESRI. And we plugged the MapObjects control into the Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 development environment and the following functions have been implemented: adding a layer or the whole layers, finding the features from the layers, zooming in or out the map and panning etc.

Finally, the geothermal data interpretation toolbox has been developed in this study, which includes temperature data interpretation on a single borehole, one-dimensional temperature field data interpretation and two-dimensional temperature field data interpretation. In addition, it's very convenient for the users to solve the various geothermal problems by using the geothermal data interpretation toolbox.