CKO


Visualisation in the CAVE

Within the project, it was planned to put significant effort into the visualisation of some of the results. To that end, CAVE time and support from "SARA" were granted to visualize:

    1. The calculated climate change by showing the evolution of the ensemble mean of several relevant fields (such as precipitation, atmosheric wind and temperature)
    2. A rare extreme weather event. For this purpose a so called superstorm was visualized
In order to visualize a super storm, the outputdata of all 62 runs was checked to locate maximum windspeeds of over 48 m/s at the 866 hPa level. The maximum daily averaged windspeed found was about 52 m/s in simulation run number 51 in the year 1961 in the North Atlantic close to the south coast of Greenland. This was not the storm that was used for the simulation because another superstorm rendered a more spectaculair visualization. This superstorm occured in simulation run number 42 in the year 2032. The maximum windspeed that occured was 49 m/s which is about 180 km/h.

The figure on the right shows a snapshot of the superstorm visualization. An isosurface of windspeed (23 m/s) with almost the size of Europe extends throughout the atmosphere and is about to hit the coast of England. Inside this colon shaped isosurface higher windspeeds occur (not shown in snapshot). On the ground the sea-level pressure is visualized using color shading. Below the storm the blue color indicates that the sea level pressure is extremely low in the heart of the storm. The bright red color shades on the bottom of the isosurface colon indicate that the gradient in the Potential Vorticity is very high. This is an indication of a lot of rotation there. All the small arrows in the screenshot indicate the size and direction of the windspeed at 1500 m. Finally contours on the ground (which are not shown in the screenshot) indicate severe rainfall values. The probability of occurance of a storm like this is estimated to be around once every five thousand years.

The visualization software used was VGeo.


Michael Kliphuis
Last modified: Mon Feb 7 12:03:01 CEDT 2005


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