Visualization of High-Resolution Weather Model Data

Abstract

Significant bottlenecks from I/O required novel techniques be used for a high-resolution severe weather simulation and visualization in the region centered around O'Hare International Airport. The Raytheon Company collaborated with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to utilize the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). WRF is a state-of-the-art parallel mesoscale numerical weather prediction system. In order to minimize the data read from disk, we develop a custom importer in Paraview to read the WRF output data directly from HDF5, de-stagger variables as required, convert the grid coordinates to first create accurate real-world (longitude, latitude, elevation) coordinates and then project them into a WGS84 coordinates. This projection enabled us to correctly co-locate the WRF data with an aviation map base layer that was texture mapped onto a refined grid to approximate the non-linearity of a (longitude, latitude) coordinate system.