Wind and Ocean Circulation shot for Dynamic Earth Dome Show

This visualization was created for the planetarium dome show film called Dynamic Earth. It is rendered with a fish-eye projection, called domemaster, which is why it looks circular. In a dome, the image fills the dome's hemisphere so that the parts near the bottom of the image are low and in front of the view, the top of the image is behind the viewer, and the left and right sides are to the left and right of the viewer.

The camera slowly pushes in towards the Earth revealing global wind patterns. The wind patterns are from the MERRA computational model of the atomsphere. As the camera continues to push in, the winds fade away, revealing ocean currents which are driven, in part, by the winds. The ocean currents are from the ECCO-2 computational model of the oceans and ice. Only the higher speed ocean currents are shown. The camera moves around the Western Atlantic highlighting the Gulf stream from above and below. The camera finally emerges from beneath sea level and moves over to the Gulf of Mexico to examine the Loop Current.

This shot is designed to seamlessly match to the end of the Earth/CME shot (animation id #3551.). Topographic features are exaggerated 20 times above water and 40 times below water. The exaggeration is primarily to allow the viewer to distinguish the depths of the flow fields.

This visualization was shown in the "VR Village" at SIGGRAPH 2015.