Design and Implementation of Multidimensional and Animated Visualization System for Typhoon on Virtual Globes

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.