MeteoVis: Visualizing Meteorological Events in Virtual Reality

Title: MeteoVis: Visualizing Meteorological Events in Virtual Reality

Teams: Google

Writers: David Li Eric Lee Elijah Schwelling Mason G. Quick Patrick Meyers Ruofei Du Amitabh Varshney

Publication date: April 2020

Abstract

Modern meteorologists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) to visualize weather data. However, AWIPS presents critical challenges when comparing data from multiple satellites for weather analysis. To address its limitations, we iteratively design with Earth Science experts and developed MeteoVis, an interactive system to visualize spatio-temporal atmospheric weather data from multiple sources simultaneously in an immersive 3D environment. In a preliminary case study, MeteoVis enables forecasters to easily identify the Atmospheric River event that caused intense flooding and snow storms along the western coast of North America during February 2019. We envision that MeteoVis will inspire future development of atmospheric visualization and analysis of the causative factors behind atmospheric processes improving weather forecast accuracy. A demo video of MeteoVis is available at https://youtu.be/GG96uO3WIy4.