Advanced Visualization Techniques for Insight in Clouds & Climate Research

Increased computational power has facilitated a transition towards atmospheric models with ever finer grid spacing. These high-resolution models reproduce the observed structure of clouds and precipitation much better than coarse-resolution global climate models, but this improved output accuracy comes with a much higher volume of output data. We suggest that advanced visualization techniques provide a means of more thoroughly exploring these output data and outline four themes where visualization has the potential to yield new insights in clouds & climate research: cloud and cloud system classification, interactions between micro- and mesoscale processes, spatiotemporal evolution of cloud structures, and model-observation evaluations. For each of these themes, we outline key research questions and provide one or two examples of how advanced visualization techniques could help us make progress. Among these examples are volume rendering to explore simulated convective systems, semantic versus geometric zooms to visualize cloud condensate density at different scales, and topological data analysis to quantify longevity of cloud and precipitation features in simulations or satellite data.