Visualizing Meteorological Data With The Geospatial Information

Recent development of data acquisition and computing technology advances the data-intensive scientific research and engineering. In terms of climate research, there is a great trend that meteorological data can be generated massively and quickly, and be used to better forecasting weather. Yet, it remains a challenging problem to apply scientific data visualization technology to the complex, massive three-dimensional data in the context of meteorology.In this paper, we describe our efforts on developing a three-dimensional spatial data visualization platform that integrates geographic information and3D numerical atmospheric data. It consists of two components:a three-dimensional virtual environment that features real-time data modeling and rendering for geographic information; and a three-dimensional meteorological data visualization system. Our system provides easy-to-use processing and operating methods for atmospheric data (such as temperature, humidity, wind, clouds, etc.). Additional features like the iso-line and iso-surface extraction, directly volume rendering, slice rendering, hybrid rendering as well as visualization of3D vector data sets are also supported. The users can intuitively modulate the operation mode, the lighting as well as the camera configuration. The described system is extendible to other climate-related applications.