Evolution of Extreme Dust Events in 3D Environment

Overview

KVL in collaboration with Prof. Ibrahim Hoteit's group visualized a simulation of an extreme dust event that happened in Saudi Arabia in July of 2018. With the goal of understanding the formation, progression, and driving factors behind the storm.

With this work we analyzed output from the WRF simulation, Weather Research and Forecasting, simulation run at a fine temporal resolution on Shaheen II. This resulted in a large amount of data that necessitated the design of the visualization environment to quickly process and visualize the simulation results. The paper entitled “Evolution of Extreme Dust Events in 3D Environment” can be accessed here.

KVL's visualization scientist Dr. Ronell Sicat supported Dr. Martinez in pre-processing the TEM scans, testing segmentation methods, and eventually post-processing the segmentation and extracted surfaces in order to get 3D geometries that were suitable for the target simulation software. KVL also provided free access to Avizo software for data visualization, segmentation, and analysis and a powerful workstation with a pen-and-tablet interface that enabled faster manual segmentation of the TEM data. KVL's contribution is acknowledged in the paper.