A new Met.3D version 2.0: Rapid exploration of gridded atmospheric data with interactive 3-D visualization

Visualization is an important and ubiquitous tool in the daily work of weather forecasters and atmospheric researchers to analyse data from simulations and observations. At the EMS 2024, we presented the state of our ongoing efforts to release a new version 2.0 of our domain-specific meteorological visualization tool Met.3D (documentation including installation instructions available at https://met3d.readthedocs.org).

Met.3D is an open-source effort to make interactive, 3-D, feature-based, and ensemble visualization techniques accessible to the meteorological community. Since the public release of version 1.0 in 2015, Met.3D has been used in multiple visualization research projects targeted at atmospheric science applications, and has evolved into a feature-rich visual analysis tool facilitating rapid exploration of gridded atmospheric data. The software is based on the concept of “building a bridge” between “traditional” 2-D visual analysis techniques and interactive 3-D techniques powered by modern graphics hardware. It allows users to analyse data using combinations of feature-based displays (e.g., atmospheric fronts and jet streams), “traditional” 2-D maps and cross-sections, meteorological diagrams, ensemble displays, and 3-D visualization including direct volume rendering, isosurfaces and trajectories, all combined in an interactive 3-D context.

This year, we present the new version 2.0 of Met.3D. The tool has become more stable (major code revisions and bug fixes), usable (featuring a new user interface, a drag-and-drop-based interactive workflow, and a batch-production mode), and integrates new visualization techniques not commonly available in other visualization tools (including interactive feature-based visualization of jet-streams and fronts, as well as interactive trajectory-based flow visualization). In this presentation, we present an overview of the updates to the software and show how it can be freely used by the community for research, forecasting, and teaching tasks.