If a picture is worth a thousand words, then that picture is worth 56,000 bytes. Turning data, numbers, and words into pictures that tell a story is the task of scientific visualization.
Scientific visualization allows scientists to communicate their findings to each other and non-scientists. The latter audience includes the general public, educators, and government officials. A good example of scientific visualization is the daily television weather report. There, visualizations take complex meteorological data and present it in an understandable format. In most cases a casual observer is not interested in the level of detail necessary to produce the visualization.
Scientists use scientific visualization to tell their story. Satellites and spacecraft collect data that is transmitted to ground stations where it is processed and then enhanced. Supercomputers create mathematical models of phenomena often unreached by observations and advance them through time. Raw data from these sources is of limited use to scientists. The data must pass through several levels of processing to be understood, with the end product depending on the user. A scientist uses the data in different ways than a non-scientist.
In the most simple terms, scientific visualization is a three-step process using data to create information that produces insight. In other words, scientific visualization is a tool that converts numbers to visual form for a better understanding of data.
The Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center commonly works with the Public Affairs Office in assisting scientists to tell their story to the world. The people who work in the studio typically have broad backgrounds in the sciences, mathematics, computer science, and visual arts. They produce about 40 hours of video per year. Other visualizations are produced by specific projects at their work sites, such as SeaWiFS and TRMM.
Creating and using scientific visualization is a narrowing process. This means, for example, that a 5-second video clip on the evening news was selected from 5 hours of videotape, which was produced from 500 hours worth of raw data. The Science Visualization Studio uses many computers with multiple processors because of the huge amounts of data processing involved in creating animations.
Scientific visualization is sometimes complicated further by missing data. For example, satellites occasionally collect incomplete data. This could occur for a variety of reasons, including sensor malfunctions, telemetry glitches, local meteorological conditions, and the path of the satellite itself. If instruments miss some of the data necessary to tell a complete story, scientists need to make a mathematical best guess to fill in the missing data. One example is ozone mapping. There is a black area in some ozone maps where data does not exist. This spot would be perceived to be the “ozone hole” by the general public. To solve this problem, data was interpolated to fill in the gap. Otherwise, the public would incorrectly interpret the images.
For more information, visit:
GLOBE Visualization Home Page
http://globe.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/home.cgi
Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)
http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/
SeaWiFS Project
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEAWIFS.html
NASA High Performance Computing and Communications Program
http://hpcc.arc.nasa.gov/
Earth and Space Sciences Project
http://esdcd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ESS/
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/
NASA Center for Computational Sciences
http://esdcd.gsfc.nasa.gov/NCCS/
Scientific Visualization Studio
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Advanced Laboratory for Parallel High Performance Applications
http://alphabits.jpl.nasa.gov/
CREDITS
Authors: Lynn Birdsong, Greg Helms, GESSEP Program
Goddard Advisor: Jarrett Cohen, Space and Earth Sciences Division
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