Australian Fine Particle Air Pollution Animation

A simulation of meteorology and fine particles (with a diameter < 2.5 um; PM2.5) was run on the NCI’s supercomputing facilities. The simulation was for December 2006 and comprised a global 5 km meteorology simulation and a 10 km continental scale and nested 3 km urban PM2.5 simulations. The model data set was output at hourly intervals, spanning the simulated month.

Scientific Computing Visualisation extracted specific parameters from the dataset, which included fine particle concentrations generated from fires, dust, sea salt, vegetation and anthropogenic sources. Cloud cover was also extracted. Data processing included adjusting thresholds and scales to highlight the important structure in each parameter and display the relative contribution of each source to the total PM2.5. These images were processed in parallel on ASC's GPU supercomputing facility, producing several high-quality visualisations in a short period of time.

For presentation and interactivity of the visualisation, a WebGL application was created. This allowed users to connect and interactively explore the simulated data.

There are 5 movies in this collection:
AllSourceThenUrban
Glob_ccam_5km_Cordex
Globe_transparent_cloud_cover_sea_salt_on_blue_marble
Glomap_1
Scientific_data_exploration_with hand gestures