Published on Aug 14, 2014
The Earth resembles a living organism is this beautiful, high resolution visualization by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
The animation shows early test renderings of a global computational model of Earth’s atmosphere based on data from the Goddard Earth Observing System Model. This particular run, called Nature Run 2, 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 visualization 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 animation was presented at SIGGRAPH 2014 during the Dailies session.
Credits: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Transition Studies 