3D Radar from Weather Underground

I was checking the weather today, a decided rainy day, and saw that Weather Underground now has a “3d Weather Radar” Feature.  The overlay the existing 2D terrain & radar map with a 3d isosurface extracted from the data.

• The 3D interface shows 3 iso-surfaces of radar dBZ (3D surfaces of equal radar echo/precipitation strength). These surfaces are 20 (green), 30 (yellow), and 50 (red) dBZ.
• A standard 2D radar image covers the ground.
• USGS terrain is drawn at 30 arc-second resolution to show topography
• Place names are drawn in white text
• Counties are drawn as black lines

It’s powered by the Unity player. It’s still very basic, and not worth much more than fun factor at the moment.  What else could they add that would make it more valuable?

via 3D Radar : Weather Underground.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Science 3d, interactive, unity, unity3d, weather, web