PV_ATMOS: Atmospheric and Oceanic Data Visualization with ParaView

Delivering weather and climate information to fellow scientists, policy makers, and the broad public necessarily involves creating graphic content. With the increasing availability of computing power on standard workstations and even mobile devices, scientific visualization has become feasible even without access to specialized high performance computing centers. The entirely Python based package pv_atmos is built on top of the open source visualization software ParaView, and has been developed to ease the visualization of atmospheric and oceanic data in netCDF format. The package includes functionality for 4D (space + time) visualizations of linear or logarithmic coordinate systems (pressure coordinates, depth, etc.), such as spherical geometry, accurate grid boxes and labeling, and integrates seamlessly with both the Python and GUI interface of ParaView. Visualizations created with pv_atmos have won awards and attracted wide media interest, as e.g. Princeton University's Art of Science competition, textbook graphics, etc. After a short introduction to ParaView and pv_atmos, I will discuss how the package can be used in various situations, and some of the more attractive examples are shown. The pv_atmos package is open source and can be accessed at github.com/mjucker/pv_atmos.