ACE - Atlas of the Changing Earth
Donna Cox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Usage Details
Donna Cox, Stuart Levy, Robert Miles Patterson, Jeffrey Carpenter, Andrew Christensen, Kalina BorkiewiczThe Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) proposes to employ Blue Waters for data preparation and visualization for two projects during 2021: CAMP 2 Ex, prototyping visualization approaches for NASA multi-instrument atmospheric field campaign data; and the first phase of CoPe, involving visualization of tsunami waves triggered by landslides.
A challenge for CAMP 2 Ex is to efficiently manage, visualize, and render time-evolving atmospheric measurement data, in a variety of forms such as radar or LIDAR scans, in context with one another and with the landscape in high-resolution production quality, for use by the scientists and for
appreciation by the public. Working with these large datasets requires more space, time, and processing power than we have locally. The work for this portion is in designing and prototyping visual methods for presenting data from multiple CAMP 2 Ex instruments’ concurrent observations, both for visualizations aimed at the participating scientists, and other visualizations intended to educate the broader public. Blue Waters would be used for preprocessing the science data, and for rendering a variety of animations.
The CoPe project is a pending NSF grant that will begin in 2021 and will involve creating visualizations of several different datasets, both combined and separately. These datasets will include glacial retreat, permafrost thaw, groundwater changes, earthquakes, landslides, impact tsunami genesis, tsunami propagation, and tsunami impact onshore. Over the course of the 5-year project, we will create a mini-documentary approximately 15 minutes in length, which is 27,000 final images of mixed visualizations and live-action footage. This will involve plenty of iteration prior to creating the final images. For a project of this scale, Blue Waters will help us with the storage of the multitude of datasets, processing power to analyze the data and to iterate on our visualizations, and to create the final imagery.
