HDCP2: SciVis contest winners announced

Upper two figures: Mountains act as an obstacle that the arriving winds from the south-west have to climb up. This results in a forced updraft with developing clouds. Clouds, shown with CLW iso-surfaces (CLW = 5 × 10 −4 kg kg −1), line up along the mountain range. Pathlines indicate the forced updraft.

Lower two figures: Finite-time Lyapunov exponents (FTLE) are an indicator for hyperbolic Lagrangian coherent structures, which act as transport barriers in vector fields. In these visualizations, altitude is reversed (ground is at the top) and North is right. Both images show the turbulent movement near the ground and updraft columns towards higher altitude. The FTLE layer at high altitudes (bottom) is the tropopause.

Cloud dynamics play an essential role in meteorology. With the increase of computational power and due to the recent advances in cloud modeling, numerical simulations become available that include cloud evolution and precipitation processes at an unprecedented level of detail.
The HD(CP)² project was chosen to deliver the data for last year's SciVis contest.The tasks that had to be solved were manifold, ranging from a general visualization (of turbulence, atmospheric trajectories, up- and downdrafts) to classification and tracking of individual properties.

The winning entry was handed in by Noel Rimensberger, Markus Gross, and Tobias Günther from ETHZ. They will present their work at the annual meeting of HD(CP)² in February 2018. Some of their visualization are seen at the right side.

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