Wind and Ocean Circulation shot for Dynamic Earth Dome Show

  • Released Tuesday, October 1st, 2013
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:51PM
  • ID: 3879
This visualization was created for the planetarium dome show film called Dynamic Earth. It is rendered with a fish-eye projection, called domemaster, which is why it looks circular. In a dome, the image fills the dome's hemisphere so that the parts near the bottom of the image are low and in front of the view, the top of the image is behind the viewer, and the left and right sides are to the left and right of the viewer.

The camera slowly pushes in towards the Earth revealing global wind patterns. The wind patterns are from the MERRA computational model of the atomsphere. As the camera continues to push in, the winds fade away, revealing ocean currents which are driven, in part, by the winds. The ocean currents are from the ECCO-2 computational model of the oceans and ice. Only the higher speed ocean currents are shown. The camera moves around the Western Atlantic highlighting the Gulf stream from above and below. The camera finally emerges from beneath sea level and moves over to the Gulf of Mexico to examine the Loop Current.

This shot is designed to seamlessly match to the end of the Earth/CME shot (animation id #3551.). Topographic features are exaggerated 20 times above water and 40 times below water. The exaggeration is primarily to allow the viewer to distinguish the depths of the flow fields.

This visualization was shown in the "VR Village" at SIGGRAPH 2015.

Composite of wind/ocean circulation layers

Still image layer rendered for the Dynamic Earth movie poster showing the Gulf Stream flowing from the East Coast of the US off into the North Atlantic

Still image layer rendered for the Dynamic Earth movie poster showing the Gulf Stream flowing from the East Coast of the US off into the North Atlantic

Composite of Earth/CME(#3551) shot and this circulation shot stitched together as they are intended

Composite of layers the transition from CME/Earth with magnetic field lines into circulation earth

Composite of CME/Earth for transition

Cloudy eath layer that matches CME/Earth shot

Cloudy eath layer that matches CME/Earth shot

Wind and ocean circulation layer

Wind and ocean circulation layer

Star field layer

Star field layer

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Missions

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Series

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Datasets used in this visualization

Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)

Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

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ECCO2 (A.K.A. ECCO2 High Resolution Ocean and Sea Ice Model)
Model NASA/JPL 2005/04/25 through 2005/11/25
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MERRA
Analysis 2005/09/05 through 2005/09/19
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Hipparcos Tycho Catalogue (A.K.A. Tycho 2 Catalogue) (Collected with the Telescope sensor)
Database

Dataset can be found at: http://archive.eso.org/ASTROM/

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