Immersive Visualization of Ocean Data in a Game Engine

Virtual Reality is expanding rapidly in many academic and industry areas as an important tool to represent 3D objects, while graphics hardware is becoming increasingly accessible. Conforming to these trends, we present an immersive VR environment created to help earth scientists and other users to visualize and study ocean simulation data and processes. Besides scientific exploration, we hope our environment will become a helpful tool in education and outreach. We combined a 1-year 3km MITgcm simulation with daily temporal resolution and a bathymetry digital elevation model in order to visualize the evolution of  Northeast Atlantic eddies enclosed by warm and salty Mediterranean Water. Our approach leverages the advanced rendering algorithms of a game engine in order to enable users to move around freely, interactively play the simulation and observe the changes and evolution of eddies in real time.