19.11.2021

With the award, the SC'21 (Supercomputing Conference 2021) acknowledges the year’s most impressive videos in high-performance computing. The videos are judged based on overall quality, how they illuminate science, and on creative innovations in the production process.

Climate simulations are one of the most data intensive scientific disciplines. This year´s winning team has performed a coupled storm-resolving simulation using the globally coupled Earth system model ICON-ESM. It allows global simulations at a resolution of 5 km to study a wide range of Earth’s weather and climate phenomena. The visualization shows the time varying 3D ocean and atmospheric data such as sea surface pressure and 10 m wind, sea surface velocity and sea ice, clouds as composition of liquid cloud water and cloud ice, sea surface temperature, and sea temperature.

The simulation was running for one model year, from which the team chose the months May, June and July for visualization. Unlike the majority of global climate visualizations, they chose the unique view of a Spilhaus projection. It puts the oceans into the center and visualizes them as one body of water, without cut outs, clipping planes and with only minor distortions. The team thereby focuses on 3D atmospheric and 3D ocean data, and the interaction between these realms.

The data used for the visualizations stems from ICON-Sapphire and ESiWACE; Niklas Röber of DKRZ created the visualizations and presented the showcase at the conference. The data was visualized using ParaView 5.7.1. The rendering was performed using Intel OSPRay, one of the two raytracing back ends available in ParaView.

Further information:
Description of the video (pdf file): https://sc21.supercomputing.org/proceedings/sci_viz/sci_viz_files/svs103s2-file1.pdf
Presentation video at SC'21: https://sc21.supercomputing.org/proceedings/sci_viz/sci_viz_files/svs103s2-file2.mp4
Visualization video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0iVY2nd2M