Robust Detection and Visualization of Jet-Stream Core Lines in Atmospheric Flow

Abstract

Jet-streams, their core lines and their role in atmospheric dynamics have been subject to considerable meteorological research since the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, until today no consistent automated feature detection approach has been proposed to identify jet-stream core lines from 3D wind fields. Such 3D core lines can facilitate meteorological analyses previously not possible. Although jet-stream cores can be manually analyzed by meteorologists in 2D as height ridges in the wind speed field, to the best of our knowledge no automated ridge detection approach has been applied to jet-stream core detection. In this work, we -a team of visualization scientists and meteorologists-propose a method that exploits directional information in the wind field to extract core lines in a robust and numerically less involved manner than traditional 3D ridge detection. For the first time, we apply the extracted 3D core lines to meteorological analysis, considering real-world case studies and demonstrating our method's benefits for weather forecasting and meteorological research.

The State of the Art in Visual Analysis Approaches for Ocean and Atmospheric Datasets

“…Guo et al [GHP∗16] also use 3D flow‐based visualization for analyzing uncertainty in temporal flow fields. Kern et al [KHS∗18a] use 3D core lines for jet stream flow analysis.…”

“…Dealing with data of such volume and complexity for different application requirements presents new challenges for visualization and visual analytics researchers, and has led to the development of many data analysis and visualization techniques. As a result, there is an ever‐growing number of publications that target different areas including: big data storage, management, processing and summarization; visualization design for multi‐resolution, multi‐dimensional and time‐varying datasets; support for interactive visual analysis, multidimensional querying and filtering; ensembles visualization; eddies analysis; uncertainty representation and visualization; predictive analytics; and interactive data analysis and steering of simulations [SGL∗16, HMC∗13, WJW∗17, KRRW18, KHS∗18a, KBL18, FTMKH∗18, WPS∗16]. Keeping in view this rapid growth in the visualization research relevant to the ocean and atmospheric data, there is a need for a structured review of the current state of the art.…”

Interactive 3D Visual Analysis of Atmospheric Fronts

“…Frontal-zone distributions of an NWP quantity of interest can be displayed for any selected front by means of a histogram. Finally, the depiction can be combined with visualizations of further features of interest, e.g., jet-stream core lines [19].…”

“…[22]). Combination with visualizations of further atmospheric features including air parcel trajectories [37] and jet-stream core lines [19] is also readily available. The latter will be demonstrated in the Sect.…”

“…Front color denotes pressure (hPa). Overlain are jet-stream core lines detected and visualized with the approach by Kern et al [19], colored by wind speed (m s −1 ). Surface contours show mean sea level pressure.…”