The NOAA Center for Tsunami Research has released a video of the tsunami propagation in the Pacific Ocean.
Propagation of the March 11, 2011 Honshu tsunami was computed with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data. From the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research, located at NOAA PMEL in Seattle, WA
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The NOAA Center for Tsunami Research has released their initial visualizations of this morning’s Honshu Tsunami event.
The graphics display forecast results, showing qualitative and quantitative information about the tsunami, including tsunami wave interaction with ocean floor bathymetric features, and neighboring coastlines. Tsunami model amplitude information is shown color-coded according the scale bar.
While the earthquake and tsunami were devastating, the plots show an interesting beauty to the event.
via NOAA Center for Tsunami Research – Tsunami Event – March 3, 2011 Honshu.
Analysis by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center revealed that April’s global average temperature was the warmest on record. Combined land and ocean temperatures were 58.1°F (14.5°C), which is 1.37°F (0.76°C) above the 20th Century climatic average. Additionally, the period of January through April, 2010 was also the warmest global average temperature on record. These record highs manifested quited visibly in North America by the rapid melting of record breaking snow depths and extents that fell during December and January of this past year.
This animation shows the global temperature anomalies for both the January through April period, daily imagery of snowfall extent from December through April as observed by the GOES, POES, and DMSP satellites, along with the April global temperature anomaly.
credit: NOAA
The Sacramento Bee has a huge page of photographs related to the Icelandic volcano, including some interesting images from NOAA & NASA taken from various satellites tracking the sulfur, smoke, and ash traveling through the air.
This image provided by NOAA shows the volcanic plume, from Wednesday’s eruption of a volcano beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier. Using sulfur dioxide concentration data from the NASA Aura/ OMI satellite sensor, it shows smoke, ash, and other components that can cause aircraft jet engines to fail. The OMI sensor can distinguish the differences between cloud, smoke, dust, ozone and other aerosols, and is important in Earth observations for aviation safety. AP / NOAA
It is a bit short, but here is a nice fly through of the Marianas Trench. I wish it was longer, and that they had gone deeper. Of course, they have lighting where there is none in the trench.
This is a flight down into a data visualization of the undersea mountains and trenches of the Pacific Ocean, ending up in the deepest part of the ocean, the Marianas Trench. The “Challenger Deep” is measured at 35,813 feet below the surface, or 10,915 meters. Courtesy of NOAA’s Marine Geology and Geophysics Division.
via : Youtube
Cyclone Catarina was a Category 1 cyclone on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale that formed in the South Atlantic and hit near the town of Torres in the southern part of Brazil on March 28, 2004. A hurricane had never formed in the Southern Atlantic according to records, so this came as quite a shock. The 2004 Atlantic hurricane season ended with an above-normal 15 named storms.
Fast forward to today, when the second recorded tropical cyclone has been found in the South Atlantic. The tropical storm, called 90Q, has maximum sustained winds of 40 knots. Fortunately we have satellites that can help us see and prepare for these storms. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM satellite measured the rainfall in the storm. From this measurement, a 3-D computer simulation was run. From the NOAA website:
This system in the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil has been classified as a tropical cyclone by the NOAA HPC. This comes 6 years after Cyclone Catarina, in March 2004, the first hurricane-intensity tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Southern Atlantic Ocean.
Fortunately, the tropical storm appears to be headed away from Brazil. Now the only question is, what does this mean for the 2010 North Atlantic Season?
NOAA has been busy today predicting and charting the results of the 8.8 Earthquake off the coast of Chile and the resulting tsunami waves.
The Chile tsunami was generated by a Mw 8.8 earthquake (35.846°S, 72.719°W ), at 06:34 UTC, 115 km (60 miles) NNE of Concepcion, Chile (according to the USGS). In approximately 3 hours, the tsunami was first recorded at DART® buoy 32412. Forecast results shown below were created with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data. The tsunami waves first arrived at Valparaiso, Chile (approximately 330 km northeast from earthquake epicenter ) earlier than other tide gages, at 0708UTC, about 34 minutes after the earthquake.
On their website you can see the massive visualizations of the wave height, earthquake, propagation animations, offshore forecast amplitudes, and more.
What do you think of the visualizations?
via NOAA Center for Tsunami Research – Tsunami Event – February 27, 2010 Chile.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently announced that it is consolidating its climate change research capabilities into the NOAA Climate Service office. As part of this consolidation, the NOAA Climate Services has recently installed a dashboard on their web site for the dissemination of climactic data in a user-friendly format. The dashboard has two tabs. The first tab, called Climate Change, covers all the hot-topic issues, such as the yearly temperature, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sea level rise, incoming sunlight, and decreasing Arctic sea ice. The published data ranges from 1880 for temperature through 2008. Some data series, such as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, do not go back the full range. The second tab, called Climate Variability, covers the Oceanic Nino index, Southern Oscillation index, Pacific-North American pattern, North Atlantic Oscillation index, and the Arctic Oscillation index. The published data for the Climate Variability data ranges from 1950 for temperature through 2008.
via : NOAA Climate Services
The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has signed a deal to work with Google to jointly develop tools to visualize the various scientific datasets they have.
Under the agreement, the agency and Google plan to work together on research and development to join NOAA’s oceanographic, meteorological, biological and climatological data with Google’s software.
NOAA officials hope the wide availability of Google’s Internet tools will deliver visualizations of NOAA data to new audiences around the world. The agreement lists six topic areas in which the agency and Google may pursue cooperative research projects: (…)
NOAA and Google have worked together before, bringing a Great Lakes feature and various Oceanographic data to Google Earth, and other US government labs for projects like the Live Cloud Layer with the Naval Research Labs. Another win for Online Public Content!
via NOAA, Google partner on data visualization project — Federal Computer Week.
What do you get when you mix a beach ball with a bunch of projectors and a few NOAA visualization scientists? You get ‘Science on a Sphere’, as the visuals are projected onto the sphere to allow true visualization of the earth’s surface. Controlled by a Wii-mote, it projects a 4000×2000 display onto the 68-inch sphere showing ocean currents, atmospheric temperatures, population trends, and anything else you can think of.
The software is written to support any number of projectors, but the zoo’s setup is typical, following NOAA’s recommendations for equipment. It uses four high-end Sony projectors that provide a resolution of 72 dots per inch on the sphere. These are aligned every morning to keep the images in sync. Each projector is controlled by a Dell Precision T3400 workstation running Red Hat Linux. A fifth T3400 hosts the content for the sphere and controls the other four computers. There is a Bluetooth connection on the control computer for the Wii Remote.
The system costs only $165,00 0and software is already available from NOAA to run on it, making it a pretty useful tool on day 1.
NOAA’s Science on a Sphere adds a new dimension to data displays — Government Computer News.
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