Using XR for Improving Scientific Discovery with Numerical Weather Models

Date

2023-10-20

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Grubb, Thomas, Kaur Kullman, Thomas Clune, Leslie Lait, Matthias Zwicker, Stephen Guimond, Ruth West, Roger Eastman, Ian Afflerbach, and Don Engel. “Using XR for Improving Scientific Discovery with Numerical Weather Models.” In IGARSS 2023 - 2023 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 1537–40, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1109/IGARSS52108.2023.10282886.

Rights

This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
Public Domain

Subjects

Abstract

Our work explores the use of extended reality (XR) to improve scientific discovery with numerical weather/climate models that inform Earth science digital twins, specifically the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) global atmospheric model. The overall project is named the Visualization And Lagrangian dynamics Immersive eXtended Reality Toolkit (VALIXR), which has two main areas of focus: (1) enhancing the understanding of and interaction with model output data through advanced visualizations in the XR environment, and (2) the integration of Lagrangian dynamics into the GEOS model, which allows a natural, feature-specific analysis of Earth science phenomena as opposed to traditional, fixed-point Eulerian dynamics. Here, we report initial work on these focus areas.