Domain Science Collaborations

Gulf of Mexico

The Sculpting Vis Collaborative works in close collaboration with climate modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory on a number of projects. One such ongoing project studies the biogeochemistry of the Gulf of Mexico in order to determine where algal blooms have occurred in the past and may occur in the future as the climate rapidly shifts. These bloom sites could prove to be an extremely valuable biofuel resource. Climate modelers use complex, multivariate simulations to understand ocean currents and chemistry and how they influence each other. We use our Artifact-Based Rendering (ABR) tool to visualize this simulation data in three dimensions with unique glyphs, streamlines, colormaps and textures, allowing scientists to better recognize and study relationships between these many interdependent variables in space.