Environmental Visualization

As data size increases in size and complexity, visualization must keep pace. Environmental visualization, in particular, often features multivariate, volumetric data, with multiple elements interacting over both time and space. The focus of this research thrust is to improve visualization of environmental simulation data, as shown in the examples above, to improve research in analysis and communication of environmental phenomena and earth systems processes. This work has extended over a multiplicity of subjects, including the Arctic, Antarctic, Gulf of Mexico, and wildfire in New Mexico. Click on the projects below to learn more about each individual section of work, and how we are working to improve visualization through innovative techniques anchored in the arts.

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Antarctica: Looking through the Ice into the Past ~ a collaboration with COLDEX scientists, Duncan Young and Shivangini Singh, UTIG, UT Austin. Their work focuses on studying the structure of the ice below the surface, revealing how it has flowed, deformed, and interacted with the landscape hidden underneath over millions of years. One of their primary goals is to locate regions where the oldest continuous ice has remained preserved. To support this mission, TACC’s visualization team reviewed the data and visualizations collected by the scientists and printed them as a 3D model. Vimeo video

Submission for the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26)

Ice, Sediment and Earth’s History ~ a collaboration with the TERMINUS scientists Benjamin Keisling and Ginny Catania, UTIG, UT Austin. Bridging a scientific exploration of Greenland’s past with an immersive multimedia content providing an entry point into the curiosities and complexities of our changing planet, TACC’s Visualization Lab displays a series of intertwining content from the collaboration on the Lab’s large monitor display. More content from this collaboration can be found here.

The Arctic ~ The Arctic environment is an increasingly intensive site of study for climate researchers across the globe. Rapid anthropogenic warming is causing the Arctic’s seasonal freezing to fluctuate, rapidly melting critical, carbon-sequestering permafrost, land ice, and sea ice.

In order to better understand these processes and how the Arctic environment will continue to change in the near and far future, scientists are turning to high-fidelity, small-scale models of earth systems physics

Antarctic ~ As rapid climate change begins to affect the Earth’s polar regions, scientists are studying the intricacies of ocean, atmosphere, and polar ice to understand how increasing temperatures will affect sea level rise and coastal communities in the coming century. One area of particular interest for a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf.

Sub-projects within this project include modeling and visualizing Antarctic polynyas and water masses beneath the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf.

Gulf of Mexico Biogeochemistry ~ We work in close collaboration with climate modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory on a number of projects. One such ongoing project studies the biogeochemistry of the Gulf of Mexico in order to determine where algal blooms have occurred in the past and may occur in the future as the climate rapidly shifts.

2019 Ridgecrest Earthquakes ~ Scripps Oceanography seismologist Alice Gabriel, led a study focused on the relationship between the two big earthquakes of the July 4, 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake, a magnitude 6.4. earthquake which occurred along a multi-fault system in order to understanding the dynamics of multi-fault ruptures because these types of earthquakes are typically more powerful than those that occur on a single fault. For more details see: Dynamics, interactions and delays of the 2019 Ridgecrest rupture sequence published in Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05985.

Wildfire ~ Fire scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and their partners have developed models that can help firefighters understand fire conditions, behaviors, and likely outcomes in terms of both risk and hazard in real time. These models are extremely complex, as they must amalgamate statistical, empirical, and physical information from numerous sources in order to provide accurate or close-to-accurate simulations of diverse types of wildfire in diverse scenarios and under a range of terrain and weather conditions.

We are working with these scientists to develop better visualization methods for LANL’s FIRETEC model simulations. These visualization methods focus on allowing scientists to see many variables overlapping and occupying the same digital, three-dimensional space, and how they interact overtime.

Sub-projects include both affective color and physicalization for LANL fire simulations.

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ASSOCIATED VIDEOS

Cultivating Macroalgae for Biofuel

Polynyas: Polar Physics Revealed through Visualization of the E3SM Global Climate Model

Visualizing Ocean Biogeochemistry in the Gulf of Mexico

Coupled E3SM Arctic: Ocean, Sea Ice and Air Interactions

Extracting Palettes from Nature to Enrich Geoscience Visualizations

SC 18: The First Water in the Universe

Modeling Ocean Currents, Understanding Climate Change

ASSOCIATED PUBLICATIONS

Colormaps that improve perception of high-resolution ocean data

Environmental Visualization: Moving Beyond the Rainbows

Intuitive colormaps for environmental visualization

Colormapping resources and strategies for organized intuitive environmental visualization