Abstract
The world is undergoing rapid changes in its climate, environment, and ecosystems due to increasing population growth, urbanization, and industrialization. Numerical simulation is becoming an important vehicle to enhance the understanding of these changes and their impacts, with regional and global simulation models producing vast amounts of data. Comprehending these multidimensional data and fostering collaborative scientific discovery requires the development of new visualization techniques. In this paper, we present a cyberinfrastructure solution—PolarGlobe—that enables comprehensive analysis and collaboration. PolarGlobe is implemented upon an emerging web graphics library, WebGL, and an open source virtual globe system Cesium, which has the ability to map spatial data onto a virtual Earth. We have also integrated volume rendering techniques, value and spatial filters, and vertical profile visualization to improve rendered images and support a comprehensive exploration of multi-dimensional spatial data. In this study, the climate simulation dataset produced by the extended polar version of the well-known Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) is used to test the proposed techniques. PolarGlobe is also easily extendable to enable data visualization for other Earth Science domains, such as oceanography, weather, or geology.
Highlights
The world is undergoing significant environmental and global climate change due to increasing population growth, urbanization, and industrialization [1,2,3,4]
It is estimated that worldwide climate simulation data will reach hundreds of exabytes by 2020 [13]
Besides falling into the category of “big data” due to its size, climate data is multidimensional in nature
Summary
The world is undergoing significant environmental and global climate change due to increasing population growth, urbanization, and industrialization [1,2,3,4]. These changes [5,6,7]. Are exemplified in the Earth’s polar regions, as evidenced by melting sea ice [8] and glacier retreat [9], which significantly affect the living environment of wildlife and biodiversity in these areas To better understand these climate phenomena and their driving mechanics, there exists an urgent need for new data, techniques, and tools to support scientific studies and the development of effective strategies to mitigate their negative influences [10].
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