Will virtual reality become a useful tool for the atmospheric sciences? If you're attending the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (December 11-15, 2017 in New Orleans, LA), be sure to drop by the UCAR Community Programs booth in the exhibition hall for some virtual reality demonstrations showing both observational and forecast data from hurricane Irma, which barrelled through the Caribbean in September 2017.
Unidata staff members Ward Fisher and Jeff Weber have been working with scientists at the Geological Survey of the Netherlands to figure out how to use netCDF datasets in the Survey's virtual reality system. Together with software developers from the research organization TNO in the Netherlands, this group has put together a visualization of hurricane Irma that can be can be investigated and manipulated (i.e. thin sliced, filtered, scaled, etc.) in real-time by multiple users with HTC Vive devices.
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