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NAS Visualization Experts Expand Access to High-Resolution Ocean Simulations

ECCO ocean circulation visualization
Detail of surface ocean current speed in the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding regions from a global 1-kilometer simulation produced with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm). This visualization shows the tremendous complexity and variability of the ocean, including surface signatures of geostrophic eddies, submesoscale eddies, and internal tides. Chris Henze, NASA/Ames

Working with research scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/CalTech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visualization experts in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division have released a new database of global ocean visualizations. The database allows a broader community of researchers to explore thousands of videos and images pre-computed from the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) project’s 1/48° MITgcm simulation, run on NASA supercomputers.

The JPL/MIT team studies the global ocean circulation and its linkages to the climate system as part of the ECCO project. The pre-computed visualizations require much less effort to view compared to the researcher downloading the data and computing the visualization.

For more than a decade, the ECCO team has visited the NAS facility to explore high-resolution views of the entire globe on the hyperwall visualization system as part of their studies of the global ocean circulation and its linkages to the climate system. Viewing their data in near-real-time on the hyperall has allowed the scientists to discover details that they had missed in previous analyses of their global ocean simulations.

To access the database, see: A World of ECCO Visualizations