Earth  ID: 3921

Simulated Clouds over Gulf of Mexico and North America

Visualizations by Alex Kekesi Released on March 8, 2012
This animation is a beauty shot of cloud model output over the Gulf of Mexico and North America. The clouds are derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). GEOS-5 is a system of models integrated using the Earth System Modeling Framework and used to help refine atmospheric weather models.

The lighting of this scene is completely artistic and not scientifically accurate. If accurate lighting were used the diurnal effect would pulse across the globe approximately every 90 frames (3 seconds when played at 30 fps). The slow strobing would have been undesireable for the intended purpose of this animation, which is to highlight the cloud model output.

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Final animation composite using all the below layers.
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Rim layer used for post-production compositing.
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Layer used to create the atmospheric haze effect.
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Cloud layer.
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Layer used to create a more realistic ocean surface.
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Land and ocean bathymetry layer.
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Background starfield layer.
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Hyperwall frames. The names of the screens that comprise the hyperwall follow the spreadsheet convention in which rows are assigned numbers, beginning with 1 at the top, and columns are assigned letters, beginning with A at the left. The display in the upper left is A1. The display in the bottom right is E3 (for a 5 x 3 display).

Visualization Credits

Alex Kekesi (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Lead Animator
Ernie Wright (UMBC): Animator
Michael Starobin (HTSI): Producer
William Putman (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
Eric Sokolowsky (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Project Support
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3921

Mission:
Terra

Data Used:
Terra and Aqua/MODIS/Blue Marble: Next Generation also referred to as: BMNG
Credit:
The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
view all stories where this data set is used
GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere also referred to as: GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere
Model - NASA GMAO - 2/3/2010 - 2/21/2010
The model is the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 30-days. GEOS-5 is described here http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/ and the cubed-sphere work is described here http://sivo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cubedsphere_overview.html.
view all stories where this data set is used
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This item is part of this series:
Hyperwall

Keywords:
DLESE >> Atmospheric science
SVS >> HDTV
GCMD >> Earth Science >> Atmosphere >> Clouds
GCMD >> Location >> Gulf Of Mexico
GCMD >> Location >> North America
SVS >> Hyperwall
NASA Science >> Earth

GCMD keywords can be found on the Internet with the following citation: Olsen, L.M., G. Major, K. Shein, J. Scialdone, S. Ritz, T. Stevens, M. Morahan, A. Aleman, R. Vogel, S. Leicester, H. Weir, M. Meaux, S. Grebas, C.Solomon, M. Holland, T. Northcutt, R. A. Restrepo, R. Bilodeau, 2013. NASA/Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Earth Science Keywords. Version 8.0.0.0.0