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Exploring the Evolution of Pressure Perturbations to Understand Atmospheric Phenomena

• Wathsala Widanagamaachchi wathsy (at) sci.utah.edu
  Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
• Alexander Jacques alexander.jacques (at) utah.edu
  Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt lake city, Utah, United States
• Bei Wang beiwang (at) sci.utah.edu
  Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
• Erik Crosman erik.crosman (at) utah.edu
  Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt lake city, Utah, United States
• Peer-Timo Bremer bremer5 (at) llnl.gov
  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California, United States
• Valerio Pascucci pascucci (at) sci.utah.edu
  Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
• John Horel john.horel (at) utah.edu
  Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt lake city, Utah, United States

Abstract

Atmospheric sciences is the study of physical and chemical phenomena occurring within the Earth's atmosphere. The study entails understanding the state of the Earth's atmosphere, how it is changing over time and why. Understanding how various weather events develop and evolve is often conducted through retrospective analysis of past atmospheric events. Atmospheric scientists can then utilize tools to better predict potential hazards and provide earlier warnings for events that may impact life and property. Several atmospheric state variables can be measured to identify high-impact events, one of which is surface atmospheric pressure. Many weather events are characterized by variations in surface pressure from the mean pressure value (i.e., pressure-perturbations). Accordingly, there is significant interest in extracting and tracking pressure-perturbations both spatially and temporally to better understand the evolution of weather events. \ \ Here, we present a visualization and analysis environment that allows interactive exploration of pressure-perturbation data sets. Our system, for the first time, enables scientists to interactively explore the spatiotemporal behaviors of pressure-perturbations for a range of values and provides support to leverage other conventional data sets. It also allows scientists to evaluate model and parameter sensitivity, which is difficult if not impossible with conventional visualization tools in atmospheric sciences. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach for retrospective analysis using different case studies of recorded severe weather events.