Volume-Rendered Global Atmospheric Model

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, 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 seven 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 a