Volume-Rendered Global Atmospheric Model

  • Released Sunday, August 10, 2014
  • Updated Friday, November 25, 2016 at 8:32AM
  • ID: 4180

This 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.


Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio


Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere (A.K.A. GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere)
ModelNASA GMAO07/16/2005 through 07/24/2005

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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