Visualizing Big Data
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- Visualizations by:
- Greg Shirah
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- Written by:
- Patrick Lynch
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- Scientific consulting by:
- William Putman
- View full credits
Clouds bend and swirl into a massive Category 4 typhoon that spins toward China. Luckily the storm only exists inside the mind of a supercomputer. The artificial storm is seen in a new visualization of Earth’s atmosphere that’s based on an extremely high-resolution supercomputer simulation created by NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). The model uses data to generate virtual scenes that mimic the natural world. Seeded with observations that include sea surface temperatures, industrial emissions and volcanic eruptions, the model simulated clouds around the globe over a two-year period from 2005 to 2007. Watch the video to see a sample of the results.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Supercomputer image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Pat Izzo
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Animators
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
- Trent L. Schindler (USRA)
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Writer
- Patrick Lynch (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Scientist
- William Putman (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Project support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Related Pages
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ID: 4180 Visualization
Volume-Rendered Global Atmospheric Model
Read moreThis visualization shows early test renderings of a global computational model of Earth's atmosphere based on data from NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). This particular run, called 7km GEOS-5 Nature Run (7km-G5NR), was run on a supercomputer, spanned 2 years of simulation time at 30 minute intervals, and produced petabytes of output. The model uses a 7.5 km cube-sphere parameterization. Geographic coordinate output volumes from the model are 5760 x 2881 x 72 voxels per time step. For each voxel numerous physical parameters are available such as temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, humidity, etc. This visualziation uses a combination of the CLOUD and TAUIR parameters.The visualization spans a little more than 7 days of simulation time which is 354 time steps. The time period was chosen because a simulated category-4 typhoon developed off the coast of China. The frames were rendered using Renderman. Brickmap volumes generated for each time step are about 2.6 gigabytes. This short visualization referenced nearly a terabyte of brickmap files. The 7 day period is repeated several times during the course of the visualization.This visualization was presented at SIGGRAPH 2014 during the Dailies session. ||
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