ParaView comes to the School of Earth Sciences

By Damien Irving and Steve Bennett

Data visualisation is crucial to the atmospheric sciences, in which large, complex 3D datasets are researchers’ bread and butter. It’s therefore very fortunate that Martin Jucker - a 3D visualisation guru (and polar vortex expert) from Princeton University - has been visiting with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science this month. In between meetings and seminars up and down the east coast, Martin kindly offered to run a half-day workshop on ParaView.

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A group of 20 atmospheric scientists from Melbourne and Monash Universities benefited from Martin’s expertise.


ParaView is a powerful scientific visualisation tool that can be used on your desktop, or scaled up to run on an a high performance cluster. If you like the look of the images below, let us know and we can look into offering more courses/support for ParaView. If you came to the bootcamp and would like more information on the routines that Martin presented, check out this paper that he published soon after the workshop.


The first half of the workshop was spent creating this visualisation of the polar vortex - a region of strong winds in the upper atmosphere that was recently linked to some very cold weather in North America.


The final visualisation was of a heatwave that affected south-eastern Australia in March 2013. Shown is the surface pressure (contours) and upper atmosphere winds.