Tracking and Visualizing Multi-Center Cyclones
Cyclones are a weather phenomenon which is still actively researched today, since their complex nature make them hard to predict, track and visualize. Facilitating easy-to-use, interactive exploration and analysis of cyclones can serve as a useful tool to support domain scientists in their research. We present a framework for tracking and visualizing multi-center cyclones, which takes into account cyclones which merge and split over their lifetime. All parts of our framework allow interaction by domain scientists: the algorithm for computing the tracking graph, selections of individual cyclone tracks and the parameters used for visualizing the results. A cyclonic regiondefines the spread and boundary of a cyclone and over time, the pressure within the region changes. Therefore, a cyclone cannot be represented by an iso-surface in three dimensions and instead, we segment a volume by region growing from the track of the cyclone and finally, extracting a surface around the cyclonic region. We offer multiple criteria for this algorithm, allowing the domain scientist to explore and visually analyze the data. Furthermore, we enable an easy overview of the cyclone time series by mapping time to the third dimension.