台风作为一种热带气旋,是影响我国东南沿海区域的主要灾害性天气。台风可视化是台风研究及预报应用的重要组成部分,在防灾减灾中发挥着重要作用。但是由于数据量巨大,台风动态交互可视化很难在网络环境下实现。虚拟地球技术的出现提供了一个新的网络可视化平台,提高了公众参与的能力,但是其很难支持专业的气象应用。基于开源的虚拟地球平台构建台风动态可视化环境,首先介绍了坐标转换、数据组织和基于GPU的体可视化这些关键技术,然后详细介绍了系统的主要功能,并在World Wind开源平台上实现相关功能的开发,最后通过一个具体的案例证明了系统的有效性和实用性。
Typhoons,a type of tropical cyclone,are the main severe weather event effecting areas on the Southeastern coast of China.Typhoon visualization is a signifiant component in weather research and forecasting applications,and plays an important role in disaster prevention and harm reduction.However,challenges arise when the volume of data is huge,virtual globes can be regarded as a logical platform to visualize such geospatial data over the Internet,but they provide few advanced visualization tools for rendering volumetric data.This paper proposes a virtual globe-based multidimensional and animated visualization system for typhoons.We describe the key technologies,including coordinate transformation,data organization and GPU-based volume rendering.Then,we present the proposed design and implementation in World Wind,introducing the main functions.To demonstrate the capabilities of this system,the data for a simulated typhoon event are rendered on the globe.