Volume-rendered global atmospheric model : the Earth like a living creature

From NASA

This visualization shows early test renderings of a global computational model of Earth's atmosphere based on data from NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5).

This particular run, called Nature Run 2, was run on a supercomputer, spanned 2 years of simulation time at 30 minute intervals, and produced Petabytes of output.

The model uses a 7.5 km cube-sphere parameterization.
Geographic coordinate output volumes from the model are 5760 x 2881 x 72 voxels per time step.

For each voxel numerous physical parameters are available such as temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, humidity, etc.

This visualization uses a combination of the CLOUD and TAUIR parameters.

The visualization spans a little more than 7 days of simulation time which is 354 time steps.

The time period was chosen because a simulated category-4 typhoon developed off the coast of China.

The frames were rendered using Renderman.

Brickmap volumes generated for each time step are about 2.6 Gigabytes.

This short visualization referenced nearly a terabyte of brickmap files.

The 7 day period is repeated several times during the course of the visualization.