Color Brewing the Perfect Storm

Using the ColorBrewer tool to colorize a scientific visualization

Today, I describe my previous 2008 efforts to colorize a Perfect Storm data simulation while I was at the Renaissance Computing Institute at North Carolina State University. This project, defined as a scientific visualization effort, focused on illustrating data from the scientific processes of weather research forecasting. The work was done as part of research with the United States Department of Energy (US DOE). The animation won an award from the US DOE and is in the public domain. A Youtube video of the visualization can be found at the bottom of this piece.

The Hurricane Visualization Effort

In climatology research, meteorologists use computational models to study the dynamics of weather. This includes exploring the formation of hurricanes. Using a computational data set based on the Hurricane Katrina storm of 2005, a perfect storm was simulated on a supercomputer using the Weather Research Forecasting model. The resulting data was then visualized with the VisIt tool, an open source and freely available tool for Unix, Windows and Macintosh workstations. VisIt was originally developed by the United States Department of Energy’s (U.S. DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI) to visualize and analyze results from…