Volume-Rendered Global Atmospheric Model: Photorealistic Rendering
Visualizations by
Greg Shirah
Released on March 3, 2015
This visualization shows an attempt at creating a photorealistic view of the Earth based on data from NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). This particular model run, called 7km GEOS-5 Nature Run (7km-G5NR), spanned 2 years of simulation time at 30 minute intervals, but only a single timestep was used for this visualization. Each voxel of the 3d volume of data contains numerous physical parameters are available such as temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, humidity, etc. This visualization uses a combination of the CLOUD and TAUIR parameters.
The goal of this animation was to make a realistic looking Earth using the GEOS-5 data. The height is exaggerated 4 times.