Creating Visualizations for the Science on a Sphere

The Science On a Sphere (SOS) was developed by NOAA as an education tool to display Earth Science data for people of all ages. With this engaging tool, one can visualize datasets that would normally be in 2D and project it globally onto the Sphere, which allows people to see how everything is connected on a global scale. These datasets range from real-time model data, such as mean sea level pressure from the GFS, to imagery of Saturn’s moon Titan. At the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), scientists utilize Python packages, i.e. basemap, cartopy, and numpy, to write scripts to visualize datasets of interests. Scientists at NCEP are primarily working with netcdf4 files for which Python is well-equipped to handle. From these files, images are generated and projected onto the Sphere.This presentation will go through the steps on how to generate images for the Science On a Sphere as well as going over scripts used to create these images. The presentation will also cover challenges faced when developing images.