Earth  ID: 11632

Visualizing Big Data

Story by Patrick Lynch | Visualizations by Greg Shirah Released on September 4, 2014
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Scientists explore Earth using supercomputers.
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.
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This visualization shows simulated clouds from July 16-24, 2005.
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Each second of the visualization contains 15 billion 3D pixels called voxels.
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The atmosphere has been exaggerated 25 times in the visualization to show fine details in the cloud layers.
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The simulation produced 5 million gigabytes of data, of which only a fraction was used to create the visualization.
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The simulation was run on the Discover supercomputer (above) at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.
 

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Story Credits

Lead Visualizer/Animator:
Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)

Visualizer/Animator:
Trent L. Schindler (USRA)

Lead Scientist:
William Putman (NASA/GSFC)

Project Support:
Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

Lead Writer:
Patrick Lynch (Wyle Information Systems)

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Supercomputer image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Pat Izzo

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11632

Keywords:
SVS >> App
NASA Science >> Earth