Scientific Visualization for Natural Disasters

ISGTW has a nice writeup on five big research projects using supercomputing computation to predict and mitigate damages from natural disasters.

In 2011, 302 natural disasters were recorded, which claimed over 29,782 lives and caused $366 billion (€295 billion) of economic damages. Today, five promising research projects are using the latest computational methods to predict or forecast – depending on your point of view – disastrous events or their effects.

Of the millions of dollars spend on the numerical simulations tho, look at the poor state of their visualizations.  Traditional isosurfaces, flow glyphs, and rainbow colormaps litter the graphics.  With the massive amount of compute power available, almost none of it is spent on actually processing the data for visualization, leaving that to tools and algorithms typically untouched in a decade.

via Five ways to anticipate natural disasters | iSGTW.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.