Simulated Clouds over Gulf of Mexico and North America
This animation is a beauty shot of cloud model output over the Gulf of Mexico and North America. The clouds are derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). GEOS-5 is a system of models integrated using the Earth System Modeling Framework and used to help refine atmospheric weather models.
The lighting of this scene is completely artistic and not scientifically accurate. If accurate lighting were used the diurnal effect would pulse across the globe approximately every 90 frames (3 seconds when played at 30 fps). The slow strobing would have been undesireable for the intended purpose of this animation, which is to highlight the cloud model output.
Final animation composite using all the below layers.
Rim layer used for post-production compositing.
Layer used to create the atmospheric haze effect.
Cloud layer.
Layer used to create a more realistic ocean surface.
Land and ocean bathymetry layer.
Background starfield layer.
Hyperwall frames. The names of the screens that comprise the hyperwall follow the spreadsheet convention in which rows are assigned numbers, beginning with 1 at the top, and columns are assigned letters, beginning with A at the left. The display in the upper left is A1. The display in the bottom right is E3 (for a 5 x 3 display).
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animators
- Alex Kekesi (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
- Ernie Wright (UMBC)
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Producer
- Michael Starobin (HTSI)
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Scientist
- William Putman (NASA/GSFC)
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Project support
- Eric Sokolowsky (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
Release date
This page was originally published on Thursday, March 8, 2012.
This page was last updated on Friday, August 2, 2024 at 6:26 PM EDT.
Missions
This page is related to the following missions:Series
This page can be found in the following series:Datasets used
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BMNG (Blue Marble: Next Generation) [Terra and Aqua: MODIS]
ID: 508Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
This dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
See all pages that use this dataset -
GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere (GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere)
ID: 663The model is the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 30-days. GEOS-5 is described here http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/ and the cubed-sphere work is described here http://sivo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cubedsphere_overview.html.
See all pages that use this dataset
Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.