一种全球尺度三维大气数据可视化系统

Visualization System of 3D Global Scale Meteorological Data

气象数据具有时变、多源、多维度、数据量大和多尺度等特征,常规的气象数据可视化方法难以满足气象预报与气象研究中的需求.描述了一个新的全球尺度三维大气数据可视化系统——AVIS.系统实现了面向各类密度场、向量场、张量场和非空间数据的可视化方法,设计了适用于大气数据的球面体绘制和混合绘制方法.系统还实现了一套跨平台并行可视化及分析构架,支持在浏览器中或其他显示和交互设备上使用,并利用后端计算集群加速数据的计算与绘制过程.案例分析表明,该系统可以全方位地展现气象数据中的信息,帮助用户综合多种气象信息进行分析.

Meteorological data are multisource, multidimensional, large-scaled and multi-scaled. As a result, it is hard to display a complicated 3d scene in meteorology using traditional visualization methods. This paper presents a visualization system, called AVIS for global scale meteorological data. AVIS employs several standard methods for visualizing density fields, vector fields and tensor fields, as well as non-spatial data. AVIS implements spherical volume rendering and hybrid rendering to support the study of internal structures. AVIS also utilizes a cross-platform and parallel framework to support the visualization both in browsers and on other platforms. The framework benefits from a back-end computing cluster and can accelerate the efficiency of computation and rendering. Use cases verify that the presented system can show meteorological data from many aspects and help users analyze multiple types of data comprehensively.