Simulated Clouds over Gulf of Mexico and North America

  • Released Thursday, March 8th, 2012
  • Updated Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 12:02AM
  • ID: 3921
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.

Final animation composite using all the below layers.

Rim layer used for post-production compositing.

Rim layer used for post-production compositing.

Layer used to create the atmospheric haze effect.

Layer used to create the atmospheric haze effect.

Cloud layer.

Cloud layer.

Layer used to create a more realistic ocean surface.

Layer used to create a more realistic ocean surface.

Land and ocean bathymetry layer.

Land and ocean bathymetry layer.

Background starfield layer.

Background starfield layer.

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).

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).

Credits

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

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

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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GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere (A.K.A. GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the 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.

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